ABSTRACT
Both authors of the papers under discussion agree that the production and the comprehension of first words take place in situations that are rich in interpersonal communication. While David Messer emphasizes the ‘nonverbal’ aspects of the communication that might assist the child in comprehending the link between reference and referent object, John Dore stresses the interpsychic experiences that might lead the preverbal child to words. They recommend that the scope of investigations of the transition period be widened to include features of the extraiinguistic input, or to include the affective events in which the communications are embedded. I concur, in general, with these recommendations. However autonomous the linguistic system may become, its roots are tangled in the network of the textual, contextual, and interpersonal properties of early communication. To anticipate Dore's argument, the same might be said about the ontogeny of the self. The task is to specify these properties as precisely as possible.
