Cooperation: Learning Language as a Social Dance

By Siri Ming

Learning to talk is about becoming a partner in a culture’s dances.

—Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley

Part 2—Joint attention as a foundation for cooperation and language

As Hart and Risley put so beautifully, language develops through cooperative interactions with others: in describing their analyses of thousands upon thousands of interactions between children and caregivers, they note that “long before the children began saying words, it was clear that they had learned the social skills fundamental to interaction” (p. 36). Within cooperative interactions, we are motivated not only by a particular outcome, but also simply by a motivation to collaborate (Tomasello, 2023). That is, the act of collaboration itself is reinforcing: collaboration may be chosen over solo opportunities to achieve a goal, and collaborative activities may be engaged in “just for fun”; if a partner stops collaborating, whether in a social game or an instrumental task, the other is likely to engage in behavior to re-engage them in the activity. Sharing the experience itself is an important source of reinforcement. 

How does this sophisticated social repertoire and motivation begin? When we look for the earliest repertoires underlying cooperative behavior, joint attention stands out as a critical cusp for language and social development—it is through the coordinated interactions between infants and caregivers that the first signs of sharing experience and a “motivation to collaborate” can be seen. Importantly, simply sharing emotion is a key component of cooperative, shared experiences, and can be considered a critical cusp for the development of joint attention, that for typically developing children develops in early infancy, before other aspects of joint attention such as sharing perceptions and goals or the triadic coordination of attention between child/caregiver and the relation of events within the environment (Rollins, 2016). 

The social dance of early child-caregiver interactions also highlights that from the earliest point of development, cooperative behavior facilitates languaging (and languaging facilitates cooperation). Adding an RFT analysis to our understanding of joint attention provides a clearer focus on stimulus functions, and how these might be established in a child’s early learning history through activities such as those that reflect shared emotion. Bidirectional, reciprocal interactions, such as those seen in joyful, mutually responsive activities, promote the earliest repertoires of cooperation, and likely begin to establish what Barnes-Holmes and Harte (2022) term “mutually entailed orienting and evoking”. Through numerous interactions, as children orient to particular stimuli, caregivers establish stimulus functions (appetitive or aversive), alongside establishing early listener repertoires. These kinds of activities also serve a function to begin establishing adult facial expressions as predictive of reinforcement, and to shape approach and engagement behavior.  In doing so, a foundation is set for learning repertoires of derived relational responding, and for the transformation of functions through relational framing.

And so, while taking an approach to learning contexts that emphasizes cooperation is also congruent with movements within the field of behavior analysis to broadly return to our historical focus on social validity, compassionate care, and a constructional vs eliminative approach to addressing behavioral challenges (e.g., Abdel-Jalil et al., 2023; Linnehan et al., 2023; Ming et al., 2023; West et al., 2024), as important as that is, it is not the only reason to pay attention to cooperation. This view is essential to effective intervention and in taking a conceptually systematic and developmental approach to teaching language. It is through cooperative interactions that we as caregivers, teachers, and therapists set the conditions for joint attention, early as well as much more complex language learning— prosociality, empathy, perspective taking and more. Cooperation creates an expansive context that supports thriving, all across the lifespan.

I invite you to consider the learning experiences in which you felt most connected to others—those in which you shared emotional experiences, coordinated your attention with another as you worked towards a common purpose, and in which the collaboration itself was as important as the final outcome. How might you create these kinds of conditions in your work with your clients?

References

Abdel-Jalil, A., Linnehan, A. M., Yeich, R., Hetzel, K., Amey, J., & Klick, S. (2023). Can There Be Compassion without Assent? A Nonlinear Constructional Approach. Behavior Analysis in Practice.

Barnes-Holmes, D., & Harte, C. (2022). Relational frame theory 20 years on: The Odysseus voyage and beyond. J Exp Anal Behav. 

Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1999). The social world of children learning to talk. P.H. Brookes Pub. 

Linnehan, A. M., Abdel-Jalil, A., Klick, S., Amey, J., Yeich, R., & Hetzel, K. (2023). Foundations of Preemptive Compassion: A Behavioral Concept Analysis of Compulsion, Consent, and Assent. Behavior Analysis in Practice.

Ming, S., Fiebig, J., & Gould, E. (2023). Understanding and applying Relational Frame Theory: Mastering the foundations of complex language in our work and lives as behavior analysts. Context Press. 

Rollins, P. R. (2016). Words Are Not Enough. Providing the Context for Social Communication and Interaction. Topics in Language Disorders, 36(3), 198–216.

Tomasello, M. (2023). Differences in the Social Motivations and Emotions of Humans and Other Great Apes. Hum Nat, 34(4), 588–604. 

West, D. M., Assemi, K., Ragulan, S., & Houmanfar, R. A. (2024). Compassionate Care, Cultural Humility, and Psychological Flexibility: Examining the Potential for Consilience in Applied Behavior Analysis. Behavior Analysis in Practice.