Book review of Elizabeth Bates

Elizabeth Bates:
THE EMERGENCE OF SYMBOLS (Academic Press, 1979)

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American developmental psychologist Elizabeth Bates pointed out that the development of language occurs while many other cognitive faculties are developing. She believes that language is not "one" isolated phenomenon but the result of a number of cognitive developments, each of which affects more than one cognitive faculty and the sum of which accounts for the development of all cognitive faculties, including language. In other word, there is no program for learning to speak, but there are several programs to learn several skills, which, together, enable "also" language. For example, we learn to play chess, but that does not mean that a program to play chess is present in our genetic information. Playing chess requires a number of skills, shared with many other tasks, that are present in our genetic information. There is no "universal grammar" a` la Chomsky. There is a global development of interconnected cognitive skills.