Temporal Cognition and Temporal Language the First and Second Times Around. Commentary on McCormack and Hoerl

He had complimented me on how I spoke Italian, and we talked together very easily. One day I had said that Italian seemed such an easy language to me that I could not take a great interest in it; everything was so easy to say. “Ah, yes,” the major said. “Why, then, do you not take up the use of grammar?” So we took up the use of grammar, and soon Italian was such a difficult language that I was afraid to talk to him until I had the grammar straight in my mind. (Hemingway, 1927) McCormack and Hoerl’s state of the art review of the development of temporal concepts from the end of infancy to the end of the fifth year shows that young children’s conception of time is quite different from that of adults. Adults and 5-year-old children can construe an event from a range of temporal perspectives and can describe it from a variety of reference times (RTs) that may not coincide with the time of the event itself (ET) or with the time of speaking (ST). Younger children are incapable of such temporal decentring. Two-year-olds’ use of tense suggests that although they do understand that events can occur before now (as in Ia te )o r after now (I will eat), thus coordinating ET and ST, the complexities of ST > ET > RT (I will have eaten )o r ET> RT > ST (I had eaten) demand additional sophistications. The developmental progression is that RT is first freed from the here-and-now of ST to permit an additional perspective from ET (e.g.,Iwaseating), and eventually it is loosed from ET too. These milestones mark the slow realization of abstract abilities of perspectivetaking, rather than perspective-switching, and demonstrate the appreciation of