South-East European Research Centre (SEERC)

Unique insight into the effects of access to language on reasoning comes from research involving deaf children, children with access to more than one language, and adults with aphasia. The findings are relevant to one of the most central issues in cognitive science: the relation between language and cognition as shown by investigations of reasoning in domains such as theory of mind, number, and spatial relations. Recent studies in these domains illustrate the extent to which reasoning is dependent on aspects of language such as grammar and conversational pragmatics.