Humans have non-verbal means for various types of mental computations, particularly those that involve concrete objects and events accessible to direct sensory experience. Unlike other species, however, (adult) humans are also capable of reasoning about abstract or psychologically distant (i.e., beyond one's direct sensory access) concepts and events, such as hidden causes, other people's beliefs and desires, counterfactual situations, and distant past and future. While reasoning about such constructs may be possible without language, it is at best inefficient (slow, imprecise, and inconsistent).

We present an argument that the development of clausal structure in children between the ages of 2–5 provides a representational tool for stage-like cognitive advancements of early childhood, previously documented in developmental research. In our view, this influence goes beyond the conceptual domain, but involves layers of syntactic hierarchy, which augment non-verbal representations and allow children to go beyond their primary, core non-linguistic (sensory-perceptual and affective), systems in reasoning about psychologically distant phenomena. We present the Gradual Emergence theory of syntax acquisition, in which the layers of sentence structure emerge in child language in a universal progression, beginning from the least complex, Small Clause, structure, progressing first to the development of transitivity, then finiteness, and finally to full clause. We review a broad swath of evidence from developmental psychology and detail our proposal that the acquisition of hierarchical syntax in the first few years of life provides the foundation for learning about the spatially, temporally and socially distant objects and events.

人类对于各种类型的心理计算具有非语言手段，尤其是那些涉及具体对象和可直接感觉体验访问的事件的手段。但是，与其他物种不同，（成人）人类还能够推理出抽象的或心理上遥远的（例如，超出了直接的感官进入）概念和事件，例如隐藏的原因，其他人的信仰和欲望，反事实情况以及遥远的过去和未来。尽管不用语言就可以进行这种构造的推理，但充其量是低效的（缓慢，不精确和不一致）。

我们提出一个论点，即2至5岁儿童的克劳结构的发展为早期阶段的阶段性认知发展提供了代表性的工具，以前在发展研究中已有记载。我们认为，这种影响超出了概念领域，而是涉及了句法层次结构的层次，这些层次增加了非语言表示形式，并允许儿童超越其主要的，核心的非语言（感官和情感）系统来进行推理。心理上遥远的现象。我们提出了句法习得的渐进性理论，其中句子结构的各个层级以一种普遍的方式出现在儿童语言中，从最小复杂的小子句结构开始，先是发展可及性，然后是有限性，最后是完整条款。我们回顾了来自发展心理学的大量证据，并详细说明了我们的建议，即在生命的头几年中获取分层语法为学习空间，时间和社会上遥远的对象和事件提供了基础。