The role of joint attentional processes in early language development

doi:10.1016/0388-0001(88)90006-X

Language Sciences

Volume 10, Issue 1, 1988, Pages 69-88

https://doi.org/10.1016/0388-0001(88)90006-X Get rights and content

Abstract

In this paper I examine the role of joint attentional processes in the child's early lexical acquisition and conversational interaction. In both cases I conclude that relatively extended periods of adult-child joint attentional focus on nonlinguistic entities, perhaps as manifest in routines, scaffold the child's early language development. On the other hand, adult directiveness — whether of child behavior/attention or of the dyad's conversational topic — has a negative effect on early language development. For both lexical acquisition and conversational interaction some findings from experimental studies are available to supplement conclusions based on correlational evidence. Based on these findings, I propose a developmental sequence of joint attentional processes in early language development and discuss the role of adults in the child's passage through this sequence.

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The role of joint attentional processes in early language development

Abstract

Cognition

An Expressive Infant's Communicative Development

Coordinating Attention to People and Objects in Mother-Infant and Peer-Infant Interactions

Child Development

Characteristics of Adult Speech which Predict Children's Language Development

Journal of Child Language

Language and Context: The Acquisition of Pragmatics

Social Bases of Language Development: A Reassessment

The Epigenesis of Conversational Interaction

Prosodic, Paralinguistic, and Interactional Features in Parent-Child Speech: English and Spanish

Journal of Child Language

The Acquisition of Pragmatic Commitments

On the Origins of Turn-taking: Alteration and Meaning

Synchronization of Visual Attention in Mother-Infant Pairs

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry

Situational Variability in Mother-Child Conversations

Mother's Speech and its Association with Rate of Linguistic Development in Young Children

The Relationship of Pragmatic Dimensions of Mother's Speech to the Referential-Expressive Distinction

Journal of Child Languag

Holophrases Revisited: Their ‘Logical’ Development from Dialog

Learning Discourse Topic Management in the Preschool Years

Journal of Child Language

The Effect of Variation in Conversational Style on Child Language Performance

The Structural and Functional Status of Single-word Utterances and their Relationship to Early Multiword Speech

The Structure of Communication in Early Language Development

The Communicative Functions of Children's Single-word Speech

Some Contributions of Mother's Speech to their Children's Syntactic Growth

Journal of Child Language

The Mental and Social Life of Babies

Topic as a Starting Point for Syntax

Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development

The Interrelationship between Event Representations and Language Use

Pragmatics of Sibling Speech: An Examination of Conversations between Preschool Age and Children and Their Two Year Old Siblings

Fathers, Siblings, and the Bridge Hypothesis