Commentary: Mother—Child Interaction Reconsidered: Commentary on Berducci

Abstract

In this commentary, I reexamine the truck-puzzle task to evaluate the actual significance of Berducci's formulation. I indicate the diversity of situation definition, the co-constructiveness of the situation, the ontogeny of the active and intentional agent who participates in the situation, and its cultural constraints. Although Berducci's formulation is not restricted to a specific task setting and is a general one, the participants in the tasks he analyzed actively interpret a diverse situation and co-construct it as active and intentional agents under the constraint of cultural norms. Therefore, we need to know the ontological status of his formulation; it is a theoretical problem as well as an empirical one.In his seminal work on mother-child interaction in the truck-puzzle task, Wertsch (1979Wertsch ( , 1985 expanded the concept of zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), wherein adults help children in solving problems (inter-psychological plane) to stimulate children solving problems by themselves (intra-psychological plane). While this has sometimes been thought of as simple instructionism, Wertsch, with the help of Bakhtin's idea of dialogue (Bakhtin, 1981), rigorously showed that the mother's approach to the child is an activity of dialogical communication, where the intentions and thoughts of the interlocutors are opposed to one another and there exists a tension between otherness and intersubjectivity; therefore, the situation is dialogically and dynamically organized. Even though Vygotsky (1962) formulated that words are elided, abbreviated, and come to have their own sense in inner speech, an abbreviation of word sense also exists in external speech (Wertsch, 1985). When the words in a dialogue between interlocutors are increasingly abbreviated, intersubjectivity between them also increases. Culture & Psychology