Discourse Analysis as a Solution to Interpretive Problems in Cognitive DevelopmentResearch

Cognitive development researchers have drawn conclusionsabout young children’s developing knowledge of number bystudying their behavior, while at the same timeacknowledging that behavior is an imperfect index ofknowledge, e.g., it may be disputed whether a givenbehavioral task accurately measures, overestimates, orunderestimates children’s knowledge. The texts of publishedresearch articles from these investigations are the focus of adiscourse analysis described in the present article. The resultsof the discourse analysis suggest that claims about what aperson knows are actually generalized descriptions ofbehavior. Therefore, in studying behavior on tasks to drawconclusions about participants’ conceptual knowledge,researchers are merely making behavioral generalizations, notinvestigating hidden cognitive or epistemic content.