It is very hard for people to accept that broad imitative tendencies apply to themselves.

The underlying response predisposition is to imitate. It takes an act of inhibition to hold this primitive response in check.

The emergence of the will and capacity to imagine what you cannot see with your own eyes, simply because you believe somebody else.

The grammatical subject is a conventionalized principle, which a community decides to impose on itself because speakers do not always specify what it is that they are talking about.

We only begin to understand what we have heard when we go beyond the words of the message and let our new understanding interact with our experiences in inexpressible ways.

Those students who can better navigate the social-semantic space—not necessarily those who know more or can reason better—will be able to produce better explanations.

Humans live with two worldviews, one private-experiential and the other social-linguistic. Communicative success rises as the space between the two worldviews shrinks.

There is, without question, a language of privilege in America that excludes those who do not speak it fluently.

We are all taught that somehow this information is inside them and that we need to draw it out.

If there ever was a Copernican moment in the history of humankind, this was it.

Speakers always come into a conversation from the two sides of an experiential gap. The gap is where the conversation takes place.

The functional specificity of language lies in the very particular functional strategy it employs. It is dedicated to the systematic instruction of imagination.

Imitation remains a powerful force in your life, even as an adult, and when educators turn up their noses at imitation, they are getting people wrong.

In a rapidly changing environment, copying the effective behaviors of knowledgeable others could be a much more effective learning strategy.

Judging by their methods and their talents, we would do well to think of children not as scientists, but as anthropologists.

Your ability to retain and reproduce without understanding gives you time to reach that understanding.

Research outside of cognitive science tends to support findings in cognitive science, not contradict them.

Transmission and reinvention need not exclude each other.

Imitation—as the term is used in the literature—is not mindless parroting or mimicry.

Ostensive communication plays an especially pivotal role in the pervasiveness of human culture.