There exists broad agreement that participatory, intersubjective engagements in infancy and early childhood, particularly triadic engagements, pave the way for the folk psychological capacities that emerge in middle childhood. There is little agreement, however, about the extent to which early participatory engagements are cognitively prerequisite to the later capacities; and there remain serious questions about exactly how narrative and other language practices can be shown to bridge the gap between early engagements and later abilities, without presupposing the very abilities that (...) they are supposed to account for. A key issue here is the normativity inherent in requesting, proferring and inferring reasons. I point out that normativity is not a property only of linguistic interactions. Normativity and conventionality are also materially instantiated in the artefactual objects that are most frequently implicated in early triadic engagements. The conventional, canonical functions of artefacts may, however, be overlaid in symbolic play by significations rooted in children's experience of blended actual and virtual worlds. Artefactual objects are amplifiers, as well as objects of consciousness. Interwoven with the symbolic forms of language, they co-constitute a specifically human biocultural niche, within and in virtue of which developing human beings become competent folk psychologists. (shrink)

This article focuses on the interweaving of constructive praxis with communication in ontogenesis, in phylogenesis and in biocultural niche evolution, within an EvoDevoSocio framework. I begin by discussing the nature of symbolization, its evolution from communicative signaling and its elaboration into semantic systems. I distinguish between the symbol-ready and the language-ready brain, leading to a discussion of linguistic conceptualization and its dual grounding in organism and language system. There follows an outline account of the interpenetration in the human biocultural niche-complex (...) of semiosphere and technosphere, mediated by the evolution of the niche of infancy. Symbolization is by definition normative; the normative character of the technosphere is demonstrated by the interrelations in human development between affordance, action schema and canonical functional object schema. A model of the neuro-computational implementation of dual grounding is proposed. (shrink)

Spatial relational meaning is typically predominantly expressed in English and related languages by die locative particle system. Even between closely related languages such as Danish and English, there are substantial differences with respect to both the semantics and the morphology of locative particles. Other languages (including Japanese), although they may use locative particles in spatial relational expression, distribute spatial relational meaning quite differendy between and within form classes. We investigate the consequences of these differences for the acquisition of spatial relational (...) expressions in these three languages. Although the structure of the target language affects the specific strategies employed by the language acquiring child, the acquisition strategies for all three languages appear to be instances of a general class of conservative learning strategies. We discuss die implications of these findings in terms of the relationship between linguistic and cognitive determinants of spatial language acquisition. (shrink)