ABSTRACT
Young children, it is conventionally assumed, remain incompetent participants in social interaction until they have mastered the intricacies of adult speech. Students of early childhood have traditionally employed an adult conception of language. Embedded within any language structure are a set of rules concerning how words and thoughts are put together. Additionally, all language structures mirror, if not create, interactional rules of conduct. Interaction is temporally sequenced and spatially bound. It involves negotiations between interacting selves. Talk is its central feature and talk often ignores actions and objects that are only tacitly recognized. Language as a set of the indicative gestures becomes the medium through which normal, everyday social conduct appears. It is necessary to digress and note how the recurrent efforts of the child to objectify self and others lead to what parents call normal problems or normal trouble.
