This paper probes the implications for psychology of recent advances in the study of young children's acquisition of communication skills. The inadequacy of traditional ways of thinking about cognitive and social development as a base for developmental psycholinguistics is discussed and the lack of attention to the basic cognitive schemes which organize the child's construction of human persons as distinct from inanimate objects is identified as a central problem. It is argued that an attempt should be made to combine basic Piagetian methodology with recent advances in the pragmatics of natural language to investigate the logical implicature of children's communication skills. Features of the linguistic communication skills of 3- and 4-year-old children are examined to determine what they reveal about the presuppositional and pragmatic base of children's utterances. It is suggested that young children begin to construct a model of human beings acting in a rule-governed social world. The basic features of this model are described and the potential contribution of such a model to the study of cognitive development is discussed. (Author/JMB)