ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some of the ways in which literacy may interact with cognitive development. Since the influential writings of Piaget and Vygotsky it has been generally agreed that an important intellectual transformation occurs during the early school years. For Piaget, this transformation is characterized as the development of operational thought which underlies such achievements as reversibility, class inclusion and transitivity. An important part of this development is the child's growing ability not only to represent objects and events but also voluntarily to reassign 'descriptions' or representations to the same object or event in a number of ways or from a number of perspectives. The chapter considers evidence that the metalanguage is acquired about the time that the child learns to read and write, that this acquisition is related either directly or indirectly to literacy, and that its acquisition has the kinds of cognitive uses we have described as a cognitive revolution.
