Intentionality and Theories of Intentionality in Development

This book is the result of a conference at the University of Toronto on the part played by intention in developing theories of mind. The chapters in the book are informed by three concepts of intentionality: intention in the narrow sense of the goal-directedness of individual actions; intentionality in the larger sense of the directedness and 'aboutness' of contents of mind−what the immediate, moment-to-moment representations in consciousness are 'about' or what an experience is an experience ‘of’; and theory of mind: the intuitive, psychological theories we have about intentionality and intentional action that influence our everyday actions and interactions. This last sense of intentionality, theory of mind, is the one best represented in the book and is, by and large, a theory of the other mind: how children learn to attribute or 'ascribe' intentional states to other persons; how a child comes to understand the intentionality of other persons and the sources of others' intentional actions; or how other persons can influence the child's thoughts and, hence, the child's actions. In contrast, the perspective taken in this review takes infant intentionality in the larger sense as the starting point in proposing that what a child has in mind, the child's intentional state, determines the child's actions and interactions in the world and, hence, the child's development, shifting the emphasis thereby to the authority of the child in the developmental process

The Power of Expression

The Inaugural Lecture as Edward Lee Thorndike Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Lois Bloom summarizes the major theoretical principles that have informed an intellectual lifetime of research in early language acquisition, and shares her delight in discovering that many of these principles echo ideas expressed by Edward Lee Thorndike, one of the early founders of American Psychology. For example, "Meanings are in persons' minds, not in words, and when we say that a word has or possesses such and such meanings, we are really saying that it has evoked, or caused, those meanings. Until it gets into a mind, a word is only puffs of air or streaks of ink"

Obituary, Arthur T. Jersild (1902-1994)

Arthur T. Jersild, a member of the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University from 1930 to 1967, was a widely respected psychologist and one of the forebears of the study of child and adolescent development. The emphasis in his research was on the importance of thoughts, feelings, and especially the “self” in the inner life of the developing child. His teaching and writing were dedicated to the idea that “research and teaching should give more attention than usually has been devoted to the subjective dimensions of human existence.

Language Development, Language Disorders, and Learning Disabilities: LD 3

This paper reports a case study of one little boy we call “Tim,” who learned language slowly and with difficulty. The study was based on eight one-hour video-recorded play sessions with Tim and his mother, starting when he was 2 years, 9 months old until he was about 5 years old. Because we were studying the language development of a child with a language disorder who could be expected to be a child with a learning disability in his school years, the study was prospective. Our study was also retrospective because we saw Tim again when he was 8 years old and in his third year in a classroom for children with special educational needs because of learning disabilities. Using the earlier recorded observations of Tim's developing language behaviors, we could go back and observe how he learned language, how his language learning varied from normal language development, and something about how difficult language learning is. The study emphasizes the importance of observing and describing the behaviors of individuals rather than groups for identifying both the regularities as well as the variation in language behavior and, more important, for understanding a language disorder as both a learning disability and a variant of language development

Transcription and coding for child language research: The parts are more than the whole.

People have been writing down what infants say at least since Charles Darwin’s diary of his son’s language development in the 19th century. Two parallel lines of development since then have influenced how we record the data of children’s language for understanding how language is acquired. One of these developments has been conceptual: The different questions researchers ask influence the sorts of data they collect. At the same time, electronic innovations continue to provide increasingly more sophisticated equipment to supplement (but not replace) paper and pencils. This chapter first presents a discussion of conceptual and procedural developments that influence observational research in child language. The main purpose of the chapter is to then describe the rationale, procedures, and equipment for computer-assisted transcription and coding, developed in Lois Bloom’s research laboratory since 1981, for studying how young children acquire language in relation to developments in their cognition and emotional expression

Incomplete and Continuing: Theoretical Issues in the Acquisition of Tense and Aspect

The purpose of this paper is to argue against a proposal to adopt formal linguistic theory to the psychological problem children face in acquiring the semantic domains of tense and aspect. As semantic rather than syntactic categories, tense and aspect vary between languages. Without universal statements about meaning, we have no reason to substitute a linguistic analysis for psychological theory. The only real alternative, then, is to attempt to characterize the child language data in terms of categories derived from a child's language behavior, and to search in the contextual events which relate to the child's utterance for cues to the acquisition of motivating categories and distinctions

Intentionality and Language Development

The purpose of this paper is to argue for explicit reference in child language research to the states of mind that underlie expression. As a result of taking this Intentional stance we can more cogently (1) address the development of capacities that make such representations possible; (2) explain certain well-known phenomena in language development such as the transitions to using words and learning grammar; and (3) explore the developmental relation among different systems of expression such as between speech and affect. Expressions, whether through action, speech, or affect, are a license to attribute the representations that underlie them. Such attributions are basic in research with children learning language. Our goal is to highlight this practice, and, thereby, offer a theoretical framework for unifying the perspectives within which research in language development is ordinarily pursued

The Conceptual Origins of the Transitive/Intransitive Distinction

Evidence is presented to support the claim that two-year-old children learning English acquire the transitive/intransitive distinction from their developing knowledge about action events, consistent with cognitivist theories of language development. Their temporal perspective on an action–when a child planned, requested, or otherwise anticipated an action–was a critical factor. Thus, acquiring the transitive / intransitive distinction was influenced by the volitionality of the locus of change in addition to the distinction between an actor and the object affected