GENERAL OVERVIEW

Lorraine McCune has written this book with the aim of uncovering the developments during infancy which pave the way for the use of referential language. McCune argues that the ability to refer is not innate, and identifies the developmental sequence of events out of which the referential capacity emerges. However, McCune is not exclusively concerned with symbolic understanding per se. Because the use of referential language depends on other abilities such as vocal speech skills, McCune considers in detail how these other skills contribute to referential language. McCune draws upon concepts from dynamic systems theory to understand how multiple interacting variables change over time and lead to the emergence of referential words. One of these variables will set the pace for language development, by virtue of being the slowest to develop. Only when a critical state has been reached across all variables will the transition to referential words take place.

CONTENT AND COVERAGE

In the first chapter McCune outlines the aims of her book, and identifies those theoretical perspectives which have influenced her own thinking. These influences include dynamic systems theory (e.g. Thelen & Smith, Reference Thelen and Smith1994), and those who have argued that mental representation is a product of development, emerging out of presymbolic abilities (Piaget, Reference Piaget1962; Werner & Kaplan, 1948/Reference Werner and Kaplan1963). McCune is concerned with the sense of ‘mental representation’ as a conscious, intentional process, rather than the more computational view of the mind as a symbol processing system. McCune argues that a critical development prior to referential language is the child's intentionality about items and events displaced in time and space.

McCune's earlier research (e.g. McCune-Nicolich, Reference McCune-Nicolich1981) examined parallel developments in representational play and language use. Because meaning can be represented by either a play action or a linguistic symbol, play is predictive of referential language (see Chapter 6). However, McCune argues that representational play is not by itself the best predictor of referential language. McCune identifies four skills which are all necessary for referential language: (i) mental representation, as found in representational play; (ii) control over the vocal motor apparatus; (iii) the understanding that a vocal production can express internal states or meaning; and (iv) the capacity for social communication. Throughout subsequent chapters McCune analyzes each of these skills individually, and then ties them together in the final chapter.

The interpersonal context out of which language develops is the focus of the second chapter. McCune argues that the relationship between parent, infant and object constrains interpersonal communication. Initially, the infant does not have a sense of being distinct from other people or objects. With both physical developments and experience of the world, the infant gradually understands themselves as differentiated from others. Communication develops out of the need to maintain contact with the parent. At first, these forms of communication are non-symbolic, such as pointing and joint attention. The infant subsequently learns to use symbolic communication, such as language. Learning to symbolize involves a gradual decontextualization of a symbol from the event in which it occurs (Werner & Kaplan, 1948/Reference Werner and Kaplan1963).

The first phase of language production is one where infants are restricted to single-word utterances. In Chapter 3, McCune argues that the initial absence of multiword productions is due to a lack of differentiated meaning; thus words refer to items and events in a holistic manner. McCune also argues that adult grammatical classes do not apply to early words and instead divides early words into nominals (referring to entities) and dynamic-event words (referring to spatial and temporal transformations). The transition to referential word use is marked by the presence of both nominals and dynamic-event words.

Both Chapters 4 and 5 look at the concepts underlying early referential words and cognitive abilities related to referential language. In Chapter 4, McCune argues against the classical view of stored conceptual knowledge. Instead, McCune favours a more fluid view of concepts as being formed ‘on-the-fly’. McCune subsequently examines the relation between language development, object permanence and means/end skills, all of which require mental representation. However, representational play is argued to provide a more comprehensive index of mental representation than these other abilities, and thus may be a better predictor of referential language use (see Chapter 6). In Chapter 5, McCune offers a semantic analysis of dynamic-event words, drawing on cross-cultural data from languages such as Korean and English. McCune argues that dynamic-event words relate to the fundamentally temporal nature of conscious representation. At the end of Chapter 5, McCune compares dynamic-event words with the adult word class of verbs. While both word classes refer to types of transformations, verbs require an additional understanding of agency, which emerges out of the child's experience of ‘self-as-force’.

Chapter 6 elaborates upon the relationship between representational play and language. In earlier work McCune (Reference McCune1995) proposed five levels of representational play, each related to attainments in language. Initially, real and play actions are elicited by the same objects, and play behaviour is simply a reproduction of all or part of the real behaviour. At this stage, referential language is not expected. Across the next two levels, play becomes differentiated from real action, first through ‘replacement’ behaviours (e.g. eating or drinking sounds) and then performance of play actions on others. Correspondingly, language progresses from the first context-limited words to becoming referential. At the next level the child represents differentiated meanings with different actions. The earliest word combinations are expected at this level, in contrast to the holistic meanings represented by single words. At the final level, play sequences are planned in advance rather than being elicited by immediately present stimuli. At this stage, language involves regularities of word order and a similar level of planning.

Importantly, because McCune is concerned with referential word production, Chapter 7 explores how infants learn to form sounds into words. From early in infancy, vocalizations become increasingly differentiated, from crying versus non-crying sounds to the babbling of phonemes. McCune reports evidence indicating that although there is some relation between babble and subsequent speech, a more robust measure of phonetic skill is required. McCune introduces vocal motor schemes, or VMSs, as a measure of longitudinally stable vocal productions. McCune presents longitudinal data indicating that VMS-level skill is a more successful predictor of referential word use than other measures of vocal ability.

In Chapter 8, McCune considers how infants learn that vocal productions can express an internal state or meaning. McCune argues that this process occurs in the development of infants' grunts. Infants' grunts begin as an index of physiological expenditure, such as when engaged in effortful attention. Through conditioning, the infant produces grunts when in a state of focused attention, even in the absence of physiological effort. McCune asserts that this transition causes the insight that a bodily action (e.g. vocal production) can convey an internal state. Grunts subsequently become communicative by serving as a ‘personal symbol’ to express whatever the child has in mind, but with no fixed meaning. McCune cites evidence that referential word use closely follows communicative grunt production.

The final chapter unifies the theoretical domains explored in preceding chapters. For the most part, McCune has examined a set of variables relatively independently of each other, offering both theory and data for how each variable is linked to referential language use. In Chapter 9, McCune applies a dynamic systems framework to explore how these variables interact with one another, resulting in the emergence of referential language. McCune provides examples of how children differ in which variable develops at the slowest pace. In all cases, the transition to referential language does not occur until this rate-setting variable reaches criterion.

EVALUATION

Although this book is specifically about early language development, the content is wide-ranging and inclusive, examining how a diverse range of abilities contribute to the production of referential language. Hence, while readers may be familiar with some of the topics covered, they may be less familiar with other topics in the book. Therefore, this book may be useful either to those wishing to understand the emergence of the referential capacity, or to those simply wanting a broader picture of early language development. Given the scope of the book, one experiences a sense of being taken on a journey around the many exciting developments which occur during infancy.

Nonetheless, amongst the breadth of the book, some arguably important topics were not dealt with in detail. Most noticeably, there was little consideration of how infants solve the word ‘mapping problem’ (see Quine, Reference Quine1960), or put simply, how an infant knows that a word has a particular meaning. Certainly, a core theme of the book is the development of the referential capacity in general; that is, how infants understand that symbols can signify internal mental content. However, a crucial element of symbolic communication is that it enables shared understanding. The conventionality of language symbols is necessary for effective communication with a social partner. Hence the ability to solve the mapping problem is necessary for progressing beyond the stage of using proto-symbols with no fixed meaning (such as communicative grunts, see Chapter 7) and for sharing the contents of mind with others (see Chapter 2). Indeed, one view is that infants' motivation to understand the contents of other people's minds leads them to interpret the intentional significance of word-learning cues such as pointing or eye gaze (e.g. Akhtar & Tomasello, Reference Akhtar, Tomasello, Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek2000). Thus, both the process and output of learning word meanings are integral to central themes of this book.

Another issue is that there was no real examination of the relation between language comprehension and production. It would have been interesting to learn about McCune's views on where the ability to comprehend words falls within her scheme of interacting variables. The ability to understand language might require all or a subset of these variables to reach a certain criterion, and these criteria may or may not overlap with what is required for language production. Understanding the relative timing of language comprehension and production might require an even more complex analysis of multiple variables than has already been presented in this book.

A more general concern is that it was unclear what mechanisms implement the developments leading to referential language. To take one critical development, McCune argues that there is a gradual differentiation of symbols from the contexts in which they occur. The child learns that words are more than actions to be performed in a given context; rather, a word can ‘stand in’ for a referent. Although McCune argues that the referential capacity is a product of development, the book seems to be lacking an account of the mechanisms facilitating this change. This is not to discredit the detailed and insightful analyses McCune provides of behaviours drawing on the symbolic capacity. However, while this book pinpoints the sequence of events out of which the symbolic capacity appears, it falls short of explicitly identifying the mechanisms which cause change from one state of symbol differentiation to the next. Nonetheless, the book will stimulate the reader into thinking deeply about these developments.

With respect to style of writing, earlier chapters of the book were difficult to follow in places. Sentence constructions and vocabulary were often rather complex, meaning some passages had to be read very carefully to be understood. The complex writing style of earlier chapters may be due to the abstractness of the theories and concepts presented in those chapters. These abstract ideas were grounded in specific details in later chapters, which were written with greater clarity. From these later chapters, the theoretical framework set up at the start of the book became clear.