• Part I. Perspectives: 1. Language, cognition and culture in developmental perspective; 2. Emergence of human minds in evolution and development; 3. Evolution and development of the hybrid mind; Part II. Developing Representational Systems: 4. Early cognition: episodic to mimetic childhood in a hybrid culture; 5. The emergence of mediating language; 6. Memory in early childhood: the emergence of the historical self; 7. The emergence of the storied mind; Part III. Developing Conceptual Systems: 8. The emergence of the paradigmatic mind; 9. The emergence of the temporal mind; 10. The emergence of the projective mind; Part IV. Conclusions: 11. Collaborative construction of the mediated mind.

"What Nelson has done, though, in a readable, accessible, but very thorough way, is put children's communicative development into relation with their prior understanding and memory for events and with their later emerging capacity to produce autonomous discourse and to enter into the worlds of knowledge that it makes possible...This book by Nelson brings together the fields of linguistic and cognitive development by describing how acquiring language makes possible massive changes in the scope of cognition." Catherine Snow, Science