This book provides a description of pre-literate children's developing ideas about writing and numerals, and it illustrates the many ways in which cultural artifacts influence the mind and vice versa. Remarkably, children treat writing and numerals as distinct even before they have received any formal training on the topic, and well before they learn how to use writing to represent messages and numerals to represent quantities. Liliana Tolchinsky argues that pre-literate children's experiences with writing and numerals play an essential and previously unsuspected role in children's subsequent development. On this view, learning notations such as writing is not just a matter of acquiring new instruments for communicating existing knowledge. Rather, the acquisition of an alphabetic writing system transforms children's view of language, and the acquisition of a formal system of enumeration transforms children's understanding of numbers. Written in an engaging narrative style, and richly illustrated with historical examples, case studies and descriptions of children's behaviour, the book is aimed not only at cognitive scientists, but also at educators, parents and anyone interested in how children develop in a cultural context.