Chapter 4

What first intrigued me about this chapter was its connection to chapter 3. Tomasello writes, "Sounds become language for young children when and only when they understand that the adult is making that sound with the intention that they attend to something." He makes this point several times, that a child can only learn language once they perceive the intention of others, which occurs around 9 months as was discussed in the last chapter. Before this point, does a child merely hear noise when an adult is speaking to them, and after it are they able to begin to attach meaning to the noise? What interested me, also, was not just how children are able to grow to understand language, but how they begin to speak it. Tomasello discusses how children imitate adults, but that unlike with a specific action, they must put themselves in the adult's position. Does this, then, mean that the child must "teach" the adult their imitation of a certain noise? I wondered if this went back and forth until the child had said the word correctly. 

This brings me to something else I noticed. Tomasello references the traditional view that language is "the symbol and its referent in the perceptual world," but rejects this by claiming that there is so much in language that does not directly refer to a physical object. This made me wonder how children go from looking at a ball and learning it is a ball, to understanding abstract emotions, to metaphors. I also wondered about how children learn such things as nuance in language, or how to understand sarcasm or irony with regard to language. That may be a totally different subject, but what came to mind for me was how the development of language must be some sort of a building process. This takes me back to the ratchet effect, that each person builds on the knowledge of those before them. It also seems that since language is always changing, that part of communication is simply a quest to accurately portray and express the world, and that our interaction allows us to perfect this.