The relationship between cognitive and motor aspects of language development

In this book, I have examined how preverbal infants acquire languages during their first year of life, focusing primarily on communication between them and their caregivers. In the domain of communication, the advent of an interest in objects places the infant, cognitively, at the entry to referential communication. After the age of five months, infants and caregivers as their communication partners negotiate the process of importing objects and events into the interpersonal sphere. This is regarded as an important step in infants' language acquisition because by the end of their first year, they are able to share in object-focused communications and elaborate upon common interests in their surroundings. Infants and their caregivers can request objects from one another and they can direct one another's attention to interesting events. Further, infants at this age begin to comment on these events, conveying messages about details and their affective significance. Thus, as long as the subject of the communication remains physically present, infants near the end of the first year and their social partners are able to enter into episodes of joint object involvement that serve a range of fundamental communicative functions.

The developmental pathway to such communication is full of many challenges. Some challenges arise because infants must master new communicative acts that pertain primarily to objects rather than to communication itself.