Abstract
This paper speculates about the developmental foundation for symbolic development in developmentally retarded infants from the perspectives of both the formation of child-object context and child-others context. It also suggests some problems in early intervention from the viewpoint of enhancing the ability of a child's symbolization.
As for our intervention for enhancing children's object manipulation skills, we try to promote children's active exploratory manipulation. In these activities, a child comes to recognize the double knowledge of the conventional meaning of objects and the meaning in the substitution for other objects.
In child-others social context, we should try to elicit the child's attention getting behavior, for example, promote showing off to others in addition to showing objects to others in give and take games. Children should be conscious of playing together with others and playfulness in such social interactions above all else.
