Understanding Common Developmental Timetables across Cultures from a Developmental Systems Perspective

Evidence that the development of communicative skills is influenced by the nature of children’s social experience raises the question of how such development occurs in cultures that differ in the nature and amount of social interaction that young children experience. Lieven and Stoll [this issue] address this question in their article ‘‘Early communicative development in two cultures’’ in which they report a longitudinal naturalistic study of early communicative development in two cultures: a remote Chintang village in Eastern Nepal and a rural area of Western Germany. During the observations there were many more adults and other children present in the village in Nepal compared to the families in Germany, and the Nepalese children were often cared for by older children. But although these cultures seem very different, in fact, Lieven and Stoll found that the children experienced about the same amount of interaction across the two cultures; it was mainly whom they were interacting with that differed. Lieven and Stoll report similar timetables in the development of early communicative skills across the two cultures: ‘‘… babies from both cultures were on a similar timetable for the emergence of basic skills involving communicative interaction: pointing, imitation, and the combined categories of offering, reaching, requesting, showing, and attention-getting’’ (p. 197). Empirical questions remain, of course, concerning individual differences in communicative development and whether different developmental timetables would be found in other cultures that might differ in other ways. However, the important developmental question raised by such research concerns common developmental timetables in early communicative development. The role of the input and the nature of the social context in which young children grow up has been a central question in