“…A great deal of research has been carried out in this area aimed at finding relationships between joint activity and the child's specific achievements. Research on linguistic development has found relationships between joint attention and the early child lexicon (Tomasello and Farrar, 1986;Bakeman and Adamson, 1986), routine activity and early word meaning (Snow and Goldfield, 1983;Harris et al, 1988), types of games and the rate of language acquisition (Camaioni and Laicardi, 1985), content of joint activity and linguistic specificity (Lucariello and Nelson, 1986), language usage (Jones and Adamson, 1987) and abstract dicourse (Sorsby and Martlew, 1991). In the same vein, with respect to cognitive development, relationships have been found between mother's instruction and child's problem-solving skills (Wood and Middleton, 1975;Wertsch et al, 1980;Hodapp et al, 1984;Heckausen, 1987), shared events and memory development (Ratner, 1984;Lucariello and Nelson, 1987) and common task definition and child planning skills (Gauvain and Rogoff, 1989).…”