One of the most salient influences on young children’s attention involves the shared gaze that occurs and develops while parents read to them. With little conscious effort children learn to focus their visual attention on what their parent or caretaker is looking at without losing an ounce of their own curiosity and exploratory behaviors. As the philosopher Charles Taylor notes, “The crucial condition for human language6 learning is joint attention,” which he and others who are involved in studying the ontogenesis of language consider one of the most important features of human evolution.
