Based on intense observations of one child's development from 1 to 3 years of age, this book describes how children acquire the knowledge they need to become persons. The book has 13 chapters, divided chronologically. Topics covered include: (1) personhood and social identity, and methodological issues; (2) 15-16 months, doing a lot with a little, paralinguistic and linguistic expressions of meaning, and language learning; (3) 17-18 months starting to take account of what others can see; (4) 19-20 months, learning in a literate world, working on words, and emerging social skills; (5) 21-22 months, developing a self-concept, object labeling, and lexicon organizing; (6) 23-24 months, the struggle for independence, internal awareness, and ways of conversing; (7) 25-26 months, new ways with words, lexicon and syntactic development, and developing social-linguistic intelligence; (8) 27-28 months, inferences and talk about mental life, talk about talking, forms of talk, and talk about grammar; (9) 29-30 months, managing the social and conceptual worlds, and levels of knowledge in a 30-month-old child; (10) 31-32 months, attending to mental states and abilities, looking for causes of behavior, developing social categories, and metalanguage about reality and nonreality; (11) 33-34 months, preschool readiness and language of the emergent preschooler; (12) 35-36 months, changing social behaviors and complex language skills; and (13) how persons develop, the potential to be a person, environmental supports for the developing person, and toddlerhood in the course of development. (Contains 202 references.) (JW)