Parent–Infant Communicative Interactions in Cultural ContextCatherine S. Tamis‐LeMonda and Lulu Song are at New York University's Center for Research on Culture, Development, and Education, and acknowledge funding by NSF BCS grant #021859 and NSF IRADS grant #0721383. We thank our colleagues and staff at the Center and NYU who contribute to our thinking about culture and development on a daily basis: Karen Adolph, Diane Hughes, Ronit Kahana Kalman, Lana Karasik, Yana Kuchirko, Diane Ruble, Niobe Way, Irene

Is 2-year-old children’s referential disambiguation of a novel word primarily aimed at identifying the word meaning or at understanding their communicative partner?

“…Indeed, language acquisition is universal, despite big cultural differences in the amount and kind of linguistic input children receive from their environment (Diesendruck, 2007; Hoff, 2006). For example, actively teaching new words to first-language learners during communicative contexts is typically more frequent in modern Western societies and rare elsewhere (Tamis-LeMonda & Song, 2012) But even in Western societies, novel words are quite commonly presented in communicative contexts that are not optimal for the child (Harris et al, 1983). Thus, however much children may be disposed and equipped to develop their vocabulary, their initial encounters with a novel word are, most of the time, aimed at understanding what the speaker means in using it on that particular occasion, for instance, to what specific object the speaker intends to refer.…”