Young Children’s Dialogical Actions: The Beginnings of Purposeful Intersubjectivity

Are higher-level cognitive processes the only way that purposefulness can be introduced into the human interaction? In this paper, we provide a microanalysis of early mother-child interactions and argue that the beginnings of joint intentionality can be traced to the practice of embedding the child´s actions into culturally shaped episodes. As action becomes coaction, an infant´s perception becomes tuned to interaction affordances.