First Steps to Communication

This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of communicative development by identifying the origins well before thr emergence to the first word, and describing how mothers and their preverbal infants and emergent talkers construct conversation . It constitutes an enhancement of our theories of pragmatics and interaction.
Catherine Snow ( Henry Lee Shattuck professor of Education, Haward Graduate School of Education)
The data and arguments presented in this book give an impressive view of the precursors required for the emergence of complex systems. Pragmalinguists will appreciate the interplay of rapidly changing communicative repertoires with the made-to-measure input provided by caregivers. Psycholinguists are met with evidence for the coincidence of linguistic spurts and communicative development . Cognitive scientists obtain ample support for interactive models of embodied cognition. All readers get a high-tech account of how children rise above what William James (1890) called 'a teeming multiplicity of objects and relation'.
Annemarie Peltzer-Karpf( Professor, Language Development and Cognitive Science Unit, Graz University)