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I see darkly though the smudge of memory, but here it is: cognitive psychologists hve for years been observingn the reactions of neonates, focusing on body language and eye movements, the latter seen as a language of communication. Kagan in The Nature of the Child reports some of this, but there's been a lot more since. Sorry, I don't keep up with the literature enough to be more specific. Recently (the last couple of years) I read an account of the results of mothers using a simple version of a limited repertoire of ASL with their preverbal (precrawling, in fact) infants--the generalized communication "I'm crying because I'm uncomfortable and you need to do something about it" gave way, apparently, to much greater specificity. Which pushes back the frontier of language skills considerably. Years since I read either Piaget or Vygotsky. The latter was very important to me. He sees the infant as a social being from the get-go. I remember one particularly stunning experiment. Two year olds placed together in a room full of toys play separately--it's called parallel play. And they verbalize about what they're doing. But without apparent interchange or even eye contact. Piaget saw this as "autistic," a manifestation of an "autistic" phase in the development of the ego. Vygotsky observed the group, then isolated each child in its own room full of toys, observing from outside. Low and behold, the same play activity, but no verbalization. Conclusion--far from autism, the verbalization was a form of communication. It's seemed to me that the different emphases of psychologists and theorists of psychology in the West and in the Soviet Union were conditioned by the political societies that surrounded them. So we get Freud nd Piaget on the one hand, emphasizing the development of the individual ego, and Vygotsky emphasizing the communal. Bakhtin's dialogism fits in here too. But I wouldn't want to make too much of such a gross oversimplification--just a thought. Maybe it's time to reread everything I've ever read. A temptation, but who has the leisure? But I'd reach for my beat-up copy of Vygotsky before I'd reach for Heidegger. Mark At 06:08 PM 10/18/2001 +0100, Christopher Walker wrote: >Mark: > ><snip> >there is considerable evidence of signing and response to signing in even >very recently born children. [Mark W] ><snip> > >That interests me. Could you say a little more? > >I come at this not from Heidegger but from the split between Piaget and >Vygpotsky. The former argues that *inner speech* is inbuilt (egocentric >speech, audible 'speech for oneself', is an accompaniment to actions; having >no social value, it simply fades away), the latter that it is (in effect) >imported from outside (egocentric speech is transitional: social speech > >egocentric speech > inner speech). Key in this is Vygotsky's explanation of >how the gesture becomes a sign through collaboration. The child reaches, the >reach is interpreted by the socialised adult; by which means the child >learns to replace practical purpose with symbolic purpose. > >CW >