SCENES OF JOINT ATTENTION: POINTING GESTURE AND CHILDREN"™S VOCAL PRODUCTION

Abstract

Developing from interactional schemes, children incorporate, during the course of language acquisition, segments from adults. At the beginning of the interactions, the child is totally dependent on adult/mother speech. Over time s/he acquires the ability to represent the intentions, attention, and knowledge, of the people they interact with, becoming, thus, independent of the statement the other and starts, by him/herself to combine words and fragments in order to establish communication with the interlocutor. However, these words and fragments do not stand alone, they are accompanied by gestures before emerging even before children start using holophrases, as being the primary form of communication between the infant and his/her caregiver/mother. In view of these facts, our objective is to show the use of the pointing gesture and its relationship with children's vocal production, in scenes of joint attention. Therefore, we analyzed two mother-baby dyads with 18-month-old children, who are part of the corpus of the Speech and Writing Laboratory of the Federal University of Paraí­ba (LAFE/UFPB), to understand the relationship between the pointing typologies described by Cavalcante (1994) and the scenes of joint attention proposed by Tomasello (2003). As a result, we can state that after the child understands that s/he can, s/he starts to combine gesture and speech to establish the interaction, characterizing an evolution in his cognitive notions.