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WHAT MAKES COMMUNICATION RUN?: CHARACTERISTICS OFSUCCESSFUL COMMUNICATIVE EPISODES

Roberta Michnick Go1inkoff and laura GordonWhat do we know about preverbal communicationdevelopment in the period immediately before theonset of speech? Other than some case studies,there exists little methodologically rigorousempirical data. The present paper describes thecircumstances under which communication succeedsand compares these episodes to episodes in whichcommunication has initially failed (Go1inkoff, inpress, called these "negotiation episodes"). Threeinfants were videotaped with their mothers on 3separate occasions during lunch between when theinfants were 12 and 18 months. Coders considered"immediate successes" to be those episodes where1) the infant signalled to the mother using gesture,vocalization, eye gaze, primitive lexical items, orsome combination of these; 2) mothers responded inan affirmative (as opposed to interrogative) mode;and 3) the infant indicated (tacit) acceptance ofthe mother's interpretation. What distinguishedthese episodes from episodes of initial failure wasto a great extent the infant's topic or goal. Farmore offers and attempts to share informationoccurred in immediate successes and fewer requestsfor specific objects., The way in which infantsindicated their acceptance of their mothers' inter­pretations of their signals was also studied.