ABSTRACT
The communicative code begins to surface during social interactions as infants enter their second year. Of particular note are symbols such as words that reside in this code. The emergence of symbols greatly expands the messages that infants can share with their social partners. The chapter discusses the first symbolic stirrings that herald the end of infancy. It considers the extensive research related to how infants begin to produce and understand words. The chapter focuses on the code’s integration into communication episodes. It examines how adults help infants to crack the communicative code and how dialogues are patterned to accommodate the use of symbols. The chapter highlights the theme of shared symbolic conventions and illustrates its nuances by considering how infants who are congenitally deaf enter the realm of the symbolic code. Infants’ first words mark an important step toward the conventionalization of communication. The vocabulary spurt marks infants’ recognition of the vastness of their culture’s conventional code.
