New Perspectives In Early Communicative Development

Since the 1970s researchers in the communicative development of infants and small children had rejected traditional models and began to explore the complex, dynamic properties of communicative exchanges. This title, originally published in 1993, proposed a new and advanced frame of reference to account for the growing body of empirical work on the emergence of communication processes at the time. Communication development in the early years of life undergoes universal processes of change and variations linked to the characteristics and qualities of different social contexts. The first section of the book presents key issues in communication research which were either revisited (intentional communication, imitation, symbolic play) or newly introduced (co-regulation, the role of emotions, shared meaning) in recent years. The second section provides an account of communication as a context-bound process partly inspired by theoretical accounts such as those of Vygotsky and Wallon. Included here are new studies showing differences in communication between infants compared with those between infants and adults, which also have important methodological implications. With perspectives from developmental psychology, psycholinguistics and educational psychology, the international contributors give a multi-disciplinary account of the expansion, variety and richness of current research on early communication. This title will be of particular interest to those involved in child development and communication research, as well as for social, educational and clinical psychologists.

This book address fundamental questions of human development, revisiting old questions and applying original empirical findings.

Psychology Library Editions: Child Development (20 Volume set) brings together a diverse number of titles across many areas of developmental psychology, from children’s play to language development. The series of previously out-of-print titles, originally published between 1930 and 1993, with the majority from the 70s and 80s, includes contributions from many respected authors in the field and charts the progression of the field over this time.

This book brings together contributions to the Fourth Artificial Life Workshop, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the summer of 1994.

In recent years the field has seen an increasing realisation that the full complexity of language acquisition demands theories that (a) explain how children integrate information from multiple sources in the environment, (b) build linguistic representations at a number of different levels, and (c) learn how to combine these representations in order to communicate effectively. These new findings have stimulated new theoretical perspectives that are more centered on explaining learning as a complex dynamic interaction between the child and her environment. This book is the first attempt to bring some of these new perspectives together in one place. It is a collection of essays written by a group of researchers who all take an approach centered on child-environment interaction, and all of whom have been influenced by the work of Elena Lieven, to whom this collection is dedicated.

This book presents a general overview of our current knowledge of language development in children. All the principal strands of language development are covered, including phonological, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic development; bilingualism; precursors to language development in infancy; and the language development of children with developmental disabilities, including children with specific language impairment. Written by leading international authorities, each chapter summarises clearly and lucidly our current state of knowledge, and carefully explains and evaluates the theories which have been proposed to account for children's development in that area.

The concept of intersubjectivity, explicit or implicit, has emerged as a common denominator in approaches to interpersonal engagements in early infancy and children's understanding of others' thought and emotion. This 1999 book brings together the most senior international figures in psychology, psychopathology, sociology and primatology to address the key question of the role of intersubjectivity in early ontogeny. Together, they offer an interesting perspective on child development, learning and communication and highlight important comparisons with processes in autistic development and in infant ape development. The book is divided into four parts, focusing on intersubjective attunement in human infancy; companionship and emotional responsiveness in early childhood; imitation, emotion and understanding in primate communication; and intersubjective attunement and emotion in language learning and language use. It is an invaluable resource for researchers in emotion and communication across the social and behavioural sciences.