Don't have much to say about chapter 5...

This was one of those passages that I have so little knowledge of the basic principles being discussed, I just kind of nodded and tried to soak up everything--I kind of gave up trying to look at things with a critical eye. The two significant questions I ended up writing down ("what do these language-learning strategies in the first section have to do with social learning?" and "how does language-learning translate to the development of cognition?") were answered almost immediately after I wrote them down.

But here's a smaller, much-less-relevant question I had relates to the specific natures of different languages. Tomasello says that the radically different grammatical structures of different languages is proof that there is no innate specific-grammar abilities we have, but he also seems to treat various stages like verb islands as universals (I'll take his word for it). He then later comes to the logical conclusion that language impacts and advances our cognitive development, through allowing us to parse the world, create abstractions, and so on. But in these radically different languages, from English to Mandarin to that Amazonian language with only present tense, does the cognitive development differ in form? Is a developing English-speaking child able to unlock different mental doors than one growing up and learning a different language, and how so? And if that's the case, are infants developing two languages at once (say, Spanish and English) equipped with more cognitive tools than those learning just one?