Examines joint attentional processes in children's early lexical acquisition and conversational interaction. Early language development builds on adult-child joint attentional focus on nonlinguistic entities. A developmental sequence of joint attentional processes in early language development is proposed, and the role of adults in this sequence…

Reviews work on the acquisition of complex verbs in American Sign Language (ASL), delineating three lines of research showing how children acquire ASL and discussing possible reasons for the particular fashion in which different children (native learners, non-native learners, and native learners with parents who are non-native learners) acquire…