Two sources of meaning in infant communication: preceding action contexts and act-accompanying characteristics

Abstract

How do infants communicate before they have acquired a language? This paper supports the hypothesis that infants possess social–cognitive skills that run deeper than language alone, enabling them to understand others and make themselves understood. I suggested that infants, like adults, use two sources of extralinguistic information to communicate meaningfully and react to and express communicative intentions appropriately. In support, a review of relevant experiments demonstrates, first, that infants use information from preceding shared activities to tailor their comprehension and production of communication. Second, a series of novel findings from our laboratory shows that in the absence of distinguishing information from preceding routines or activities, infants use accompanying characteristics (such as prosody and posture) that mark communicative intentions to extract and transmit meaning. Findings reveal that before infants begin to speak they communicate in meaningful ways by binding preceding and simultaneous multisensory information to a communicative act. These skills are not only a precursor to language, but also an outcome of social–cognitive development and social experience in the first year of life.

An Alternative to Mapping a Word onto a Concept in Language Acquisition: Pragmatic Frames

“…Clearly, different timescales have to be taken into consideration ( Rkaczaszek-Leonardi, 2015 ): the immediately preceding context and the interaction experience that the child brings into the situation. Concerning the immediate context, Liszkowski (2014) recently highlighted the importance of preceding action contexts as a source of symbolic development. More specifically, he reported findings revealing that in 12- to 14-month-old children, the outcome of the reference process differs depending on what the agent has done or seen before (see also Moll et al, 2006 ).…”

“…Thus, joint actions are crucial and establish a context/history of interaction against which young children already interpret or use the communicative means. Whereas Liszkowski (2014) discerns the immediately preceding action contexts as an ingredient of meaningful behavior in young children starting to communicate, he barely considers the conventionalization process ( Clark, 1993 ; see Pragmatic Frames—an Introduction and History). Waxman and Gelman (2009 , p. 261) made the critical point that associationist approaches disregard “the fact that each word participates in an exquisitely detailed linguistic, social, and symbolic system.” It is not just the association that is formed in the learning process.…”

Language as a multimodal phenomenon: implications for language learning, processing and evolution

“…an analogue format, to the categorical information encoded in either the speech of spoken languages or the signs of signed languages. The contribution by Liszkowski [50] looks at communication in infants before they start to use spoken language forms and demonstrates the vital role of multimodal information in structuring infant comprehension and production in pre-linguistic communicative contexts. Liszkowski first reviews evidence that infants are sensitive to common ground and use information from preceding action contexts in their communication and then shows that infants are also able to systematically extract meaning from multimodal cues in the communicative act itself, including prosody, posture and gesture, independent of situational information.…”

Reference as an Interactive Achievement: Sequential and Longitudinal Analyses of Labeling Interactions in Shared Book Reading and Free Play

“…Therefore, she or he needs to tie acts of pointing or verbal deictics and labels “to the construals of entities and events provided by other meaning-making resources as participants work to carry out courses of collaborative action with each other” (Goodwin, 2003b , p. 218). Hence, to identify the referent, the coparticipant draws on contextual resources; that is, her or his understanding of the joint activity (e.g., book reading, building a tower) in which the reference is embedded (Hindmarsh and Heath, 2000 ; Liszkowski, 2014 ). She or he then develops hypotheses about the meaning of the pointed-to target (Stukenbrock, 2009 , p. 307).…”

“…Mothers have been found to point and refer to objects verbally more often in episodes of JA (e.g., Bruner, 1981 ; Tomasello and Farrar, 1986 ; Marcos, 1991 ). Furthermore, parameters for “referential transparency” (Trueswell et al, 2016 , p. 11; Schmidt, 1996 ) have been identified that help children to attend to novel objects visually and thus to resolve ambiguities when linking objects with words (Pruden et al, 2006 ; Horst and Samuelson, 2008 ; Axelsson et al, 2012 ; Liszkowski, 2014 ; Trueswell et al, 2016 ; Yu and Smith, 2016 ). Adult coparticipants often present objects and actions in salient ways.…”