ABSTRACT

Beginning with Bruner’s (1975, 1983) detailed descriptions of in other-infant interactions, many theorists have highlighted the importance of joint attention in early language learning. 1 The empirical work inspired by Bruner’s ideas focuses on infants and children engaged in dyadic interactions with their caregivers. In these studies, joint attention has been defined as periods of time during which the caregiver and child are mutually focused on one another and on the same object or activity. The results show that dyads who engage in more episodes of joint attention generally have children with larger vocabularies (e.g., Tomasello & Farrar; 1986; Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998). Several ethnographic studies of families outside of the Western middle class context (e.g., Ochs, 1988; Schieffelin, 1990) indicate, however, that many of the world’s children grow up in situations in which they experience relatively little joint attention—at least in the form in which it has been characterized and measured in dyadic interactions between parents and children. As these children all go on to speak and understand language, it is important to examine more closely the relation between joint attention and early word learning. That is the aim of this chapter.