This symposium was especially organized with younger researchers in order to exchange and discuss our practical problems.
K. Murakami reported that during her training of referential communication skills over a month, the changing of roles of speaker and listener was found to be effective. Y. Oshima emphasized the importance of two-way communication situation, where there was no fixed roles of speaker or listener. She also suggested to use “concepts” as referents. N. Hamana introduced the “Mother-Child Interaction Process Analysis” developed by Hokkaido U. group. She mentioned the importance of mother's responsiveness to her child as the global result of their ongoing project. T. Muto especially emphasized the importance of sponta-neous actions of children at the communication situation. Reporting their previous studies, he showed how both cognitive and social factors affected children's questioning behavior.
Iwata suggested the expected usefulness of introducing the situation where no linguistic code could alone be almighty. This might clarify the power of linguistic codes at the real communication stituation. Usui and Tajima expressed their strong interest on ecological methodology and explained its value. Miyake tried to summarize the reports. According to her, the first two focused on the referential communication itself and try to see its relation to other tasks. the third one, on the other hand, handled communication skills as only one factor among various others which have been expected positively affecting child's desirable socialization. She explained that the difficulty of communication studies lay under the fact that every communication situation was the real mixture of cognitive and social factors concerning about the child development.
Some useful discussions from all participants followed above comments. As a summary, we realized the importance of concretizing the aim and the situation of our communication studies in order to accumulate our various results.
