Social Cognition, Joint Attention and Communicative Competence from 9 to 15 Months of Age

The studies in this volume measure the various behaviours that are displayed as infants and mothers share their attention on an outside object: joint engagement, following gazes and points, gestures, imitation of actions, and language comprehension and production.

The authors show how infants follow a progression from "sharing" to "following" to "directing" others' attention and behaviour, and how these skills are related to early communicative competence.

Their results have important implications for theories of social-cognitive and language development.