ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the importance of Jean Piaget's contribution about the passage between practical to representative intelligence but also to propose a new way to explain the emergence of semiotic behaviors in children and the role of signs in thinking. The semiotic function is the mechanism that allows for representative intelligence, a form of thinking that is radically different from sensorimotor intelligence. Signifiers are differentiated from the signified only when symbolic play, language, or deferred imitation appears. Signifiers are possible because of imitation. For Piaget, imitation is explained by the accommodation of action schemes to objects. The departure point is constituted, for Vygotsky, in interpsychological situations in which children share the systems of signs with adults, who use them in an open and external form to communicate and to mutually regulate themselves. For Piaget, the semiotic function has, then, a fundamental role; it explains the passage from sensorimotor intelligence to representational intelligence.
