ABSTRACT
The children talk about what they are seeing and doing makes it possible for caregivers to understand many utterances that would otherwise be uninterpretable. As the child developed, reference to objects outside the current context became more frequent and the range of topics that was appropriate to discuss broadened systematically. Zukow, Reilly, and Greenfield have provided a detailed analysis of the way caregivers use well-understood contexts to facilitate the child's transition from non-linguistic to linguistic communication. The first goal of this study was to describe the emergence of reference to absent objects and past or future events in the conversations of a child and her parents. Although considerable development takes place during the 12-36 month period studied here, the child's abilities as a conversational partner continue to change throughout childhood. Cultural values and beliefs also influence early caregiver-child discourse, and recent work by Schieffelin on the development of communicative competence in children in a Papua.
