Young Children’s Dialogical Actions: The Beginnings of Purposeful Intersubjectivity

Abstract

Are higher-level cognitive processes the only way that purposefulness can be introduced into the human interaction? In this paper, we provide a microanalysis of early mother-child interactions and argue that the beginnings of joint intentionality can be traced to the practice of embedding the child's actions into culturally shaped episodes. As action becomes coaction, an infant's perception becomes tuned to interaction affordances.