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Human Ways of Sharing

Developmental psychology and language acquisition name several mechanisms by which a subject acquires language. They are not rivals — a learner runs more than one at once. They fall into two groups: mechanisms that carry the common inward to the subject, and mechanisms that also run the other way, letting a subject feed its own experience back into the common.

Inward — absorbing the common

Internalisation

Vygotsky: a mental function appears twice — first on the social plane, between people, and only afterwards within the person. What is done in shared activity with others is gradually taken inward to become the subject’s own, carried inward by the sign, language above all. Acquisition as the outside becoming inside.

Usage-based learning

Tomasello: language is learned from use rather than generated by an innate grammar. The subject extracts it from encountered speech through intention-reading (grasping what others mean) and pattern-finding (categorising and analogising over what is heard), building grammar piecemeal from concrete instances toward abstract schemas. Frequency entrenches what recurs.

Statistical learning

Saffran: the learner tracks regularities in the stream itself — which sounds follow which, and how often — and finds structure in them. Eight-month-olds segment words out of continuous speech from the transitional probabilities alone, before any reading of the speaker’s intentions is in play. The most minimal mechanism of the group: acquisition running on the bare distributional structure of what is heard.

Construction

Piaget: knowledge is neither innate nor imprinted from outside but built by the subject through its own activity — assimilation fitting new experience to existing structures, accommodation altering the structures when they fail, and equilibration driving the system toward a more stable organisation. No structure without a construction.

Imitation and cultural learning

Tomasello again, distinguishing grades by how much of the other’s mind the learner takes on: emulation (reproducing a result), imitative learning (reproducing the means as an intentional way to a goal), and instructed learning (internalising a teacher’s perspective). The high-fidelity grades are what let a stock of tools accumulate and hold across generations — the ratchet.

Natural pedagogy

Csibra and Gergely: a dedicated channel for knowledge that comes addressed. Ostensive cues — eye contact, being called by name, the exaggerated melody of speech aimed at infants — mark what follows as for the learner, and what is so marked is taken as generic: not a fact about this thing here and now, but how such things are. Teaching, on this account, meets a receiver tuned for it from the start.

Both ways — feeding the private back in

Scaffolding

The mechanism named around Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development — the gap between what a learner manages alone and what the same learner manages with help. A more capable other supports the learner within that gap, and the support is withdrawn as the learner takes the task over. The same mechanism runs either way: a subject who holds something can support another into it, so it is as much a means of giving into the group as of taking from it. (The term “scaffolding” is Bruner’s, not Vygotsky’s.)

Coupling

Di Paolo, with Hanne De Jaegher: participatory sense-making, in which meaning is generated in the interaction itself rather than transmitted from one party or drawn from a static store. The interaction takes on a coordination of its own, and each party contributes to what arises in it — so a subject’s own experience feeds the shared meaning as it forms, rather than only being drawn from it.