Blackwell Reference Online

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Successful communication requires the continuous coordination of the attention of self and others to meanings carried by actions, gestures, and/or words, as the participants unceasingly negotiate a shared understanding. Thus, for the infant-novice, the process of becoming adept at participating in everyday life entails becoming able to engage in interaction and to negotiate sufficient shared meaning to maintain a practical consensus that permits interaction to continue in a mutually intelligible way. Are these abilities preadaptations, autonomously learned, guided ( Fogel, 1993 , p. 85), or some combination of all these things? Is communication the individual achievement of either the “sender” or the “receiver” ( Papoušek, 2007 )? Or is it co-constructed? Should we expect the same course of development across cultures or do different cultures nurture different paths ( De León, 2000 ; Keller, 2007 )? There are two broad frameworks available for approaching these questions. The first is the traditional cognitive science approach ordered around the concept of internal representations. Here, meanings, intentions, and so on are regarded as not directly observable, since they are processes that are internal to an organism, and, thus, can only be inferred from the behaviors that they produce. Therefore, development is conceived as a process of becoming better able to interpret the behaviors ... log in or subscribe to read full text