Chapter published in:
Social Environment and Cognition in Language Development: Studies in honor of Ayhan Aksu-Koç
Edited by F. Nihan Ketrez, Aylin C. Küntay, Şeyda Özçalışkan and Aslı Özyürek
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 21] 2017
► pp. 19–34

Chapter 2
Becoming social and interactive with language

| Stanford University, USA

Children interact with others from early in infancy: They smile in response to smiles, follow adult gaze, attend to objects others are looking at, mimic adult intonation contours in their babbling, and make use of gestures and actions to attract attention. They interact more intensively as they advance from crawling to walking. When they begin to talk, they add words to their gestures and gradually move on to more complex utterances. But to communicate content effectively, children must take turns in conversational exchanges. For this, they need to contribute appropriate content and get the timing right so that they come in on time when they answer a question or make a further contribution to the ongoing conversation.

Keywords: pragmatic development, turn taking, gesture, conversational skills, contingency
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Precursors to conversational turn taking
  • 3.From gestures to words
  • 4.Taking turns
  • 5.Constructing utterances together
  • 6.Fine-tuning the timing
  • 7.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 18 July 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.21.02cla
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