I am hoping to take a look at the work on gestures that Vera mentioned, and
we also have the phenomena of interactional synchrony as a pretty
fundamental basis for co-regulation.
My vague intuitions so far run like this (call it a speculation or a
hypothesis):
a) unconscious interactional synchrony is phylogenetically and
ontogenetically pretty early, it is the principal foundation on which joint
attention and communication and the interactional-learning-in-the-zpd
capabilities are built;
b) joint attention is needed for interactional learning of a certain kind,
but the assumption of intentional-mind-of-the-other is not;
c) there is a communicationally viable proto-semiotic in which gesture and
speech are more or less indistinguishable
d) co-regulation does not need to be conscious, or involve joint mutual
attention, to ground interactional learning in its most basic forms
Obviously there are a lot of empirical questions to be asked to examine
these points more carefully.
For further theoretical development, I think a key issue is what we believe
about 'learning': do all forms of learning have much in common? what?
Suppose we limit ourselves just to learning in which another human plays a
key role, a role that depends on something they can do or do better than
the learner at first, and where what the learner learns is somehow 'like'
that. But we do not limit ourselves to learning that requires language as
such, especially not fully developed language, and we do not limit
ourselves to cases where there is conscious awareness that learning is
taking place (on the part of either party).
What are the most elemental and rudimentary, developmentally and/or
phylogenetically earliest forms of _social_ learning in the sense specified
above? What is the nature of the 'link' (e.g. co-regulation, interactional
synchrony, ...) between participants? What can transpire without, and then
at more advanced stages with: joint attention, reflexive consciousness of
learning, full language capabilities?
There must be such a thing as social _motor_ learning, both a pre-semiotic
stage, and then a proto-semiotic one (e.g. just learning to move in a
certain way, then to Do Things that have a meaning as such -- but not yet
perhaps Doings that have no function other than to mean, as symbolically,
which is the full semiotic stage).
My view of the ontogeny/phylogeny of semiosis is that it is originally
perceptual-motor (rather than yet specifically gestural, postural,
linguistic, etc.) with primary interpersonal functions (establishing a
'with', qualifying that 'with' in ways that semiotically are precursors to
evaluations -- want/reject?, close/distant?, etc. a kind of early
relationship-building), and that as it develops/evolves we find progressive
differentiation of resource systems (e.g. speech from gesture, etc.), and
of function (interpersonal from informational, etc.).
So the idea here is that conscious social learning through semiotic
mediation means has as its precursors or antecedents a sort of unconscious
sensorimotor social learning through proto-semiotic mediation -- and that
the whole complex of social-interaction-patterns, mutual
attention/awareness, mediational means, and social-learning-capabilities
develops and evolves as a fairly unified cluster of such interdependent
elements.
Within a picture like this (admittedly hazy) one can then look for what is
happening to matters like means-ends reconnection (as in the
imitation/emulation discussionn).
As a simple step, what is known about, say, interactional synchrony in
chimps and other nonhuman primates? and in infants? that should be a very
simple empirical issue, as these fuzzy things go ...
And: What is the observed, developmentally earliest role of gesture in
interpersonal communication? how does its patterns of functional
integration with speech change in the earliest stages as language
capabilities develop? and in all of this, with the functional focus
primarily on interpersonal interaction first ... and then on proto-learning.
Just a scaffold, and a rickety one at that ... JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
---------------------------