ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide that movement a boost via an analysis of communicative development across childhood, stressing some of the processes through which meaning is generated and sustained in human discourse. It argues that socially shared processes such as language are, alone, inadequate to understand communication and its development. The analysis and extension of current work converging on the problem of communicative development thus reveals that such development involves a complex nexus of cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural, and behavioural achievements. The relationship of interpersonal cognition to communication has been most often studied through assessing the role of perspective-taking ability in making listener-adapted message choices. Communication is always interaction and thus shares the characteristics of interaction in general. Since the psychological domain of experience should be more manifest in the child’s world, the child of such a parent gradually should be led to develop communicative strategies taking the wants, needs, and interests of the listeners into account.
