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P~ "Expressive' Infant' s Comunication Developlent Lauren B. ~son , Michael Tomasello and Lorna Lazarus Benbenit~

This report describes how one infant, ~ia, comunicated with adults and peers from G to 33 months of age. We began to observe her during a !on~itudinal study of preverbel co~unication from 6 to 18 ~,onths. She distinguished herself from the other 13 infants in her ~ho~ by being extremely emotive yet strikingly nonverbal. Hen the group study ended, we continued to observe ~ia, predicting both that ~e would display an "expressive" (as opposed to a referential) style of language acquisition and that she would master early language in a "leap" directly to multisord utterances. These predictions were confirmed.

A~lysis of how Maia ~unicated during social interactions revealed that there was ~ simple .pping between her "style" of language (defined according to criteria of Nelson and others) and her early co~unicative interests. She was object oriented d,ring social interactic, ns. Moreover, she used nonverbal ar~ verbal leans to serve a broad array of couunicative functions including the referential.. The one function that was consistently absent througho,t the study was the metalinw

This study, coupled with other re~rts, confin, that there are paths toward language other than the much studied "referential" one. ~reover, i t also suggests that not all 'expressive" infants follow the same route. In Maia's case, she was "expressive" but she also used language quite frequently for a variety of other functions. ~at characterized this child, and perhaps other children, is not a ~edominance of social-regulative uses of language over object-oriented ones, bat rather a lack of concern with the verbal code itself.