ABSTRACT
In recent years considerable attention has been paid to the communicative experiences of the child moving from the prelinguistic to the linguistic period. Whereas the resulting research is by and large a worthy effort that expands our knowledge of early interactive behavior, I submit that much of the work was motivated by inappropriate goals derived from questionable theoretical foundations. To maximize the worth of future efforts in this area, we need to clarify and modify the goals of such research, recognizing how the findings to date bear on those goals. We also need to formulate new research questions, the answers to which will further our attempts to provide both explanatorily and descriptively adequate theories of communicative development. To begin that process, I outline in this chapter what I believe motivated, however tacitly, much of the past research and why such motivation is misguided. Then I present a sketch of an alternative theoretical view of communicative development and defend it on two grounds. First, it avoids some of the pitfalls associated with the theoretical basis behind the earlier research, and second, it takes account of more of the facts we already know about communicative development. Finally, I end with a set of research questions motivated by this new theoretical sketch.
