AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Reviews Wagner, Manuela, First Steps to Communication: A Pragmatic Analysis. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2006. Eva Maria Eberl The appearance of this volume, which is, to quote the back cover, “an important contribution to our understanding of communicative development”, will be welcomed by everybody interested in the emergence of language in infants. Manuela Wagner presents an up-to-date account of research into the pragmatics of preverbal communication and the subsequent transition of the infants to spoken language. The readers are given a broad picture, ranging from communicative intents to pragmatic and perceptual issues in early language development. The first section of the book provides an overview of important literature on the different stages that preverbal children go through on their way to language. It introduces theories on prelinguistic communicative tools such as eye-gaze and joint visual attention, as well as theories on the role of maternal input for the infant’s language acquisition process. The “continuity-discontinuity” issue is presented: does preverbal communicative development gradually lead to verbal language or are there larger equilibrial stages from which the infants abruptly move on to the next. The specific framework for the experiments was set by two studies that were conducted at the Max-Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, where communicative interactions of mothers and infants of various age groups (ranging from 6 months to 24 months) were analyzed. The first study investigated the number and nature of speech acts and interchange-speech act combinations of the children in the different age groups. Furthermore, the proportion of interpretable and uninterpretable communicative intents, the proportion of nonverbal and verbal speech acts, and the proportion of mother and child turns in the different age groups, were examined. Regarding child-directed-speech, the study looked at how and whether at all mothers adapt their communicative repertoire to their infants. The cross-sectional studies used the so-called Inventory of Communicative Acts- Abridged (INCA-A Coding Scheme; Ninio, Snow, Pan, and Rollins 1994) to define the pragmatic framework for the data analysis. The INCA-A Coding Scheme is a powerful tool for detecting communicative intents and behavior of infants at the beginning of Reviews 336 their linguistic development. It includes categories such as greeting on meeting or parting, showing attentiveness, directing hearer attention for objects and persons, discussing a joint focus of attention, discussing the nonpresent, negotiating possession of objects, demanding clarification of verbal communication or of action, and many more. Wagner and her colleagues first applied the INCA-A Coding Scheme to infants as young as 6 months of age and included a new category, ‘precursors to communicative intents’ (see explanation below), in the transcriptions. The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES; MacWhinney 2000) was used for the transcription of the data and was expanded to include nonverbal communicative behaviors such as eye gaze and pointing. The discussion of study one revealed that with age, infants use a larger repertoire of interchanges, speech acts, and interchange-speech acts. Older infants were usually easier to understand and displayed more sophisticated use of communicative acts. Regarding maternal communication strategies, the study showed that mothers fine-tune their communicative input to match the infant’s linguistic stage. Mothers displayed more attentiveness with younger infants and directed the infant’s attention more often to a joint focus of attention than they did with older children. Mothers also talked more with younger children as a way to verbally accompany the infant’s activities. In addition to scaffolding the infant’s behavior verbally, mothers also provided perceptual support by putting objects on easy display for the infant. With older children, mothers were shown to use more varied speech acts, including questions, and an increase in many INCA-A classes, e.g. discussing a joint focus of attention and directing the hearer’s attention, was noted. Highly directive speech on the parents’ part (e.g. attracting and redirecting the infant’s attention) is very useful for scaffolding a more meaningful communication that teaches the infant when to take a turn in the conversation and what to attend to. In the older age groups, mothers tended to more often ask for clarification of communication. In the first study, Wagner found that the youngest age group (6 months) seemed to be more communicatively active than the coding results suggested. This led to a follow-up study in which the data from study one was reanalyzed and PCAs - Precursors to Communicative Acts - were introduced. PCAs are defined as communicative behaviors in which infants try to participate in the conversation but do not fulfill all the requirements for intentional communicative acts (see p. 168). Study two was specifically designed to detect early and subtle attempts of the very young infant to participate in communicative exchange. PCAs proved to be a useful category to define nonverbal communicative strategies of very young infants, and showed that at 6 months of age, children already start to willfully engage in communication. Wagner was able to show that joint visual attention can be achieved with infants as young as six months, contrary to earlier claims (e.g. Tomasello 1995, note, however, the different definition of joint visual attention) that placed this ability at the end of the first year. Wagner proposes to solve the problem with a “processoriented view” that connects joint visual attention and verbal communication through the identification of distinct mechanisms of early linguistic development. From this perspective, it is possible to show the developmental and socio-cognitive relationship between precursors to communicative acts and joint visual attention. The study of very early communicative acts can provide answers to the debate over continuity versus discontinuity in early communicative development. There has Reviews 337 been a controversy over whether preverbal communicative acts gradually become verbal communicative acts (e.g. Piaget 1952, 1954) or whether the different communicative acts constitute separate equilibria (Chomsky 1975, Lenneberg 1967). Wagner’s study reveals that when children start to combine precursors to communicative acts, they express early communicative intents. Furthermore, communicative exchanges that are expressed nonverbally by very young infants were shown to be expressed verbally by older age groups. These two hypotheses strongly favor the continuity hypothesis. While Wagner realizes the limitations of a cross-sectional study in investigating early communicative development and argues for longitudinal studies, her findings are an important contribution to the field of preverbal communicative development. Longitudinal studies also enable the early detection of communicative disorders in atypical preverbal development. The book is well produced and structured and is accessible even for non-specialists in the field of prelinguistic development. Many tables and diagrams guide us through the sections and present the experimental results in a clear way. The pictures and quotes (from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) are well selected to fit the contexts and highlight the gist of each chapter. The book can be highly recommended to readers looking for a detailed critical account of theories on early communicative development and new experimental findings enriching this exciting area of research. References: Chomsky, N. (1975). Reflections on Language. New York: Pantheon Books. Lenneberg, E. (1967). The Biological Foundations of Language. New York et al.: Wiley & Sons. MacWhinney, B. (2000, 3 rd edition). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Ninio, A., Snow, C., Pan, B.A., and Rollins, P.R. (1994). “Classifying Communicative Acts in Children’s Interactions”. Journal of Communication Disorders 27. 158-187. Piaget, J. (1952). The Origins of Intelligence in Children. New York: Norton Press. Piaget, J. (1954). The Construction of Reality in the Child. New York: Norton Press. Tomasello, M. (1995). “Joint Visual Attention as Social Cognition”. In: Moore, C., and Dunham P.J. (eds.). Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Eva Maria Eberl Institut für Anglistik Universität Graz