ABSTRACT
It has been claimed that children under the age of six or seven are very bad at communicating, precisely for the reason that they are bad at decentring-or that they are highly ‘egocentric’.
This claim has been made most forcibly by Jean Piaget, and it has been backed by much supporting evidence. He has made it central to his theorizing about the capacities of children in the pre-school and early school years. He has constructed such a far-reaching and closely woven net of argument, binding together so many different features of the development of behaviour, that it is hard to believe he could be wrong.
