The cognitive content includes the conceptual base plus specific individual conceptualizations that are stored in memory: that is, knowledge. Into this content the child begins to assimilate, in part through the foregoing processes, certain conventionalized signs- people-produced communication displays which stand for some internal meaning-and rules for selecting and sequencing these signs. That is, the child's cognitive content will come to contain a subcontent called language.

In our way of thinking, this language sub-content will consist of whatever signs, and rules for sequencing these signs, that the child is exposed to for any significant amount of time. Thus, the signing language of the deaf may come to constitute a major portion of the language content of a deaf person. Even in hearing persons, however, we expect certain nonverbal, gestural symbols to constitute a subset of the language signs and rules. Thus, we do not restrict the concept of language to the spoken language-although it is the spoken language that is of major interest to us.

Typically, at about the age of two years, the processes of listening and uttering begin to be used for languaging; the child has begun to use the oracy processes of auding and speaking (Stage 3 of Figure 1). When a child's listening is directed toward speech, rudiments of verbal language comprehension begin, and a specialized listening activity-auding, the process of listening to speech in order to language-is defined. Auding is a subset of the more general class of activities involved in listening. This means that while there are listening-but-not-auding activities, there are no auding-but-not-listening activities. Auding is a special kind of listening. When the child begins to produce utterances that resemble the speech he listens to, we say he is speaking. Thus speaking is derived from and forms a subset of the more general activity of uttering.