From the beginning of life, a child's acts of meaning are joint constructions, enacted through dialogue between himself and a significant other by reference to whom he is achieving a personal identity. When the child begins to control his material environment, he begins the transition to systematic symbolic construction. At the same time, he is construing his body and achieves the semiotic freedom of construing meanings into systems. This choice of meaning is the essential characteristic of protolanguage. The second major transition is from protolanguage into language, which includes grammar. The basic form of information is turning shared experience into meaning. Conversation evolves as the joint construal of shared experience, whereby phenomena accessible to both parties' consciousness are turned into meanings through dialogue. In the course of time the child discovers that language can take the place of shared experience. In early child language development, narrative is a form of dialogue, verbalization of shared experience so it can become part of a shared construction of reality. Examples are drawn from interactions of a young child with his parents. (MSE)