Social and cognitive bases of early comprehension of object reference

In the present study, we investigated the performance patterns of 48 children between 6 and 17 months of age in order to explore the relationship between certain social and object-related skills and the early comprehension of linguistic object reference. All children were tested for (1) their understanding of another's gestural attempts to direct their visual attention to locations either to the child's right or left side, or to 180 ° behind the child (joint attention skills); (2) their spontaneous use of functional and socially influenced action patterns (schemes) with objects on themselves, a doll and another person; and (3) their comprehension of object labels in a forced-choice vocabulary testing situation designed to control for context and chance performance. Objects used in the vocabulary test were selected for each child based on maternal report. Based on Werner and Kaplan's (1963) framework for the development of linguistic object reference and published and unpublished reports, we predicted that all children credited with two or more words on the vocabulary test would follow another's gaze or point to either side as well as behind themselves and would spontaneously demonstrate social schemes with objects on both themselves and on others. The results very strongly supported the hypotheses for the relationship of both of the joint attention skills and the social schemes on self to object label comprehension. The hypothesized relationship of schemes on others to object label comprehension was not unequivocally supported. Theoretical and practical implications of the results were discussed.