ABSTRACT
This chapter considers toddlerhood to extend from approximately 1 year to 3 years of age, an admittedly arbitrary time frame, but one that corresponds nicely with major transitions in cognition, communication, self-care, and fine motor development. The chapter discusses the cognitive components of tool use and spatial relations on cognitive skills, but the development of scribbling provides a nice example for the sequence of fine motor development in tool use. The chapter highlights that the motor behavior of typically developing toddlers is determined to some extent by maturation and physical growth but also is governed by increasingly sophisticated cognitive processes. Children who demonstrate representational thought and symbolic use of language have made a great leap in cognitive development. The cognitive aspects of language learning are based in the representational thought processes. By the end of the toddler years, the language of typically developing children demonstrates cognitive processes of memory, imitation, categorization, sequencing, and spatial relations.
