Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Much of the book has explored the assumption that non-verbal tests have enabled developmental psychologists to make the surprising scientific discovery that human infants have the capacity for interactive and non-interactive mentalizing. In the Epilogue, the book turns to a significant challenge for the author’s assumption raised by the views about infants’ core social cognitive capacities recently defended by Elizabeth Spelke, a leading advocate of the core cognition research programme. Core cognitive systems do not speak to one another and lie at the boundary between perception and cognition. On Spelke’s account, there is no room for infants’ pragmatic expectations about non-verbal communicative interactions in social core cognition. Spelke takes the combinatorial resources of the human language faculty to enable human infants to overcome the limits of their core cognitive systems. This proposal rules out the possibility that infants’ capacity to mentalize play any role in learning the meanings of content words from the lexicon of their native language. Nor is it clear how the combinatorial power of the human language faculty could support infants’ pragmatic expectations about non-verbal communicative interactions.</jats:p>