This book is an academic study of language acquisition and infant communication. An interpreter of infant communication examines the actual communicative behavior of the infant as well as the literature, a discourse surrounding that sort of behavior. One cannot simply observe an infant and say something meaningful without saying it in the context of an explicit discursive background. In a real sense, that background provides not only a referential focus but an implicit epistemology. The infant under scrutiny takes on a particular appearance by dint of that epistemology. On the one hand, one hastens to become exposed to the discourse created by others who have also observed children; on the other hand, one observes and chronicles the actions and speech of a child or of children.
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