Abstract
Abstract Analyses of interactions between an adult and a one-year-old child are often connected with studying early communicative competences, e.g. the child’s participation in turn-taking sequences, in joint attention, and use of pointing gestures. Infants’ communicative behaviors were studied using a structured observational measure - the Early Social Communication Scales (Mundy et al., 2003) in a study of 358 12-month-old children. An exploratory factor analysis revealed: (i) a distinction between the categories of initiation and response among the behaviors displayed, (ii) simple and complex behavior categories occurring; (iii) the presence within one factor of behaviors fulfilling various functions (e.g. requesting and sharing interest). An analysis of the results showed that communicative competences can be classified according to their level and ignoring their function, and made it possible to suggest modifications to the way in which behaviors are coded on the ESCS and to complement the procedure of studying early communicative competences.
Highlights
Most psychologists working in the field of language in children today agree with the thesis that children’s linguistic competence develops on the basis of their early communicative competence (Bokus, 2010; Kurcz & Okuniewska, 2011)
In the introduction we shall briefly discuss the changes taking place in early social interaction as well as analyzing the concepts associated with preverbal development of communication
The third model assumed that behaviors related to joint attention, social interaction and requests are all manifestations of the same basic skills of early social communication, whereas skills related to initiating these behaviors and responding to them are something different
Summary
The course of the development of communication in children is based on passing through three stages: (1) perlocutionary, in which the child exerts an influence on the recipient but does not do so in an intentional manner; (2) illocutionary, in which children intentionally use nonverbal signals (e.g. pointing gestures) to express requests (protoimperative gesture) or direct the attention of adults to an object or event (protodeclarative gesture); (3) locutionary, in which children utter sentences and use speech sounds using the same performative structure which they previously used nonverbally. Discussing joint attention, Tomasello (1999) argued that it encompasses a whole range of social skills which are triadic in character and in which children begin to participate around the end of their first year These are gaze following, joint involvement, social reference, use of protoimperative (related to requesting objects) and protodeclarative (related to sharing interest in an object) pointing gestures, and learning through imitation. Factor-based explorative analyses allowed us to specify the elementary components of communicative competencies of 12-month-old infants revealed in interaction with adults
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