This book is a selection of papers from a conference which took place at the University of Keele in July 1982. The conference was an extraordinarily enjoyable one, and we would like to take this opportunity of thanking all participants for helping to make it so. The conference was intended to allow scholars working on different aspects of symbolic behaviour to compare findings, to look for common ground, and to identify differences between the various areas. We hope that it was successful in these aims: the assiduous reader may judge for himself. Several themes emerged during the course of the conference. Some of these were: 1. There is a distinction to be made between those symbol systems which attempt, more or less directly, to represent a state of affairs in the world (e. g. language, drawing, map and navigational skill) and those in which the representational function is complemented, if not overshadowed, by properties of the symbol system itself, and the systematic inter-relations that symbols can have to one another (e. g. music, mathematics). The distinction is not absolute, for the nature of all symbolic skills is, in part, a function of the structure of the symbolic system employed. Nonetheless, this distinction helps us to understand some common acquisition difficulties, such as that experienced in mathematics, where mental manipulation of symbols can go awry if a child assumes too close a correspondence between mathematical symbols and the world they represent. 2.

Table of Contents:
Toward a skillful psychology.- Waves and streams of symbolization: Notes on the development of symbolic capacities in young children.- Graphic Skills.- The use of communication tasks to investigate depiction of spatial relationships in young children’s drawings.- Intellectual realism in adults’ and children’s copies of cubes and straight lines.- The conservatism of children’s drawing strategies: At what level does stability persist?.- Children’s representations in drawing and speech: Content, structure and context.- Young children’s planning strategies and early principles of spatial organization in drawing.- Individual drawing styles of three children from five to seven years.- Children’s sensitivity to aesthetic properties of line drawings.- Reading and Spelling.- Microethology of spelling behaviour in normal and dyslexic development.- Phonological impairment in Italian: Acquired and developmental dyslexia.- Interaction of symbol systems in reading.- Bi-alphabetism and word recognition.- The development of strategies in the acquisition of symbolic skills.- The development of phoneme segmentation skills in young children.- Understanding the alphabetic system.- Patterns of writing errors in the framework of an information-processing model of writing.- The psychological productivity of inflectional and derivational morphemes.- Symbolic Skills in the Deaf.- Symbolic skills in the deaf: Some recent developments in research.- Meaning in sign: Recalling events in British Sign Language and English.- Early sign language acquisition and cognitive development.- The semantics of early deaf communication: Object acquisitive volitionals.- The development of symbolic play in young deaf children.- Language, deafness and mathematical reasoning.- Musical Skill.- Is musica symbolic skill? Introduction.- The perception of musical pitch - A sense of scale.- The initial identification of tonal centres in music.- Towards a contour-pitch continuum theory of memory for melodies.- Reproduction and representation of musical rhythms: The effects of musical skill.- A preliminary investigation of motor programming in piano performance as a function of skill level.- Logical Skill.- Logical development: Introduction.- What preschoolers know about animate and inanimate objects.- Knowledge-derived categorization in young children.- Perception of inclusion in collections of objects.- Semantic and cognitive factors in class-inclusion and co-extension performance.- On the generalizability of conservation: Context and transformation.- Map and Navigational Skill.- Maps and navigation: Introduction.- Maps and memorability.- Children’s plan drawings of their houses.- Mental imagery and mental maps.- Spatial representations of taxi drivers.- First Language Acquisition.- Symbolic skill acquisition in language: Introduction.- The role of symbolic thought in language development.- On the acquisition of the notion of types of flying objects: Support for prototype-based theories of word meaning development.- A study of children’s writings in non-instructional settings.- Hidden meanings: The role of covert conceptual structures in children’s development of language.- Second Language Acquisition.- Second language acquisition: Introduction.- Universal grammar and second language acquisition.- Similarities and differences between first and second language acquisition: Setting the parameters of universal grammar.- The predictive role of the theories of markedness and language transfer in second language acquisition.- Cerebral organization in bilingual and deafsubjects.- Mathematical Skill.- The acquisition of mathematical skills: Introduction.- Numerical representation from infancy to middle childhood: What develops?.- Young children’s ideas about the written number system.- Cognitive factors in children’s arithmetic errors.- Effects of reference domain in children’s comprehension of coordinate graphs.- Exploring difficulties in transforming between natural language and image based representations and abstract symbol systems of mathematics.- Abstracts: Poster displays and other papers given at the conference.- Participants.- Author Index.