Psychology & Society, 2010, Vol. 3 (1), 77 ‐ 91 77 Culture in Infancy: An Account of a Way the Object “Sculpts” Early Development NEVENA DIMITROVA Institute of Psychology, University of Lausanne The aim of this paper is to bring into consideration a way of studying culture in infancy. An emphasis is put on the role that the material object plays in early interactive processes. Accounted as a cultural artefact, the object is seen as a fundamental element within triadic mother‐object‐ infant interactions and is believed to be a driving force both for communicative and cognitive development. In order to reconsider the importance of the object in child development and to present an approach of studying object construction, accounts in literature on early communication development and the importance of the object are reviewed and discussed under the light of the cultural specificity of the material object. How does culture influence early human psychological development? How can we find evidence for the way a child becomes a member of his or her surrounding cultural society? These questions have shaken developmental scientists since the importance of the interpersonal relationship dynamics was unanimously admitted. The enormity of such questions is overwhelming when a single study tries to address it in order to provide general laws of psychological development. However, in the past 50 years, important advances have been made. With many others, J.S. Bruner provided brilliant insights of the way culture shapes the mind. In one of his most known studies, he found that young children’s social environment has an impact on the way they perceive the size of American coins – when a child is raised in a significantly poorer socio‐economic environment, he or she tends to overestimate the size of coins (Bruner & Goodman, 1947). Among the classical theories of child development, there are approaches that study the influence of social, cultural and historical dimensions on the child’s psychological functioning. Vygotsky’s cultural‐historical theory is one of the most considered. He opened the scope of studying child development by theorizing that the mind is mediated by cultural signs and only by accounting for those mediation processes, human psychology can be approached. According to Vygotsky, the signs that mediate the mind are the linguistic signs; in an ontogenetic perspective, that means that the child’s psychological functioning starts to be mediated by culture when language emerges, around age 2. Before that, during the two first years of life, development is a fruit of the child’s internal biological processes. It is with language that the natural and cultural lines of development would merge and allow the development of higher mental functions. Moro and Rodríguez (2005) questioned this nature‐culture dualism in the preverbal years. Since the infant is in constant relations with other people and artifacts, this necessarily has an impact on his or her development. The authors emphasized the fact that interaction and