This article elucidates the unfolding of 3 phases of cognitive development through which typical children move during the first 2 years of life to illuminate the interrelationships among early cognition, communicative intention, and word-learning strategies. The resulting theoretical framework makes clear the developmental prerequisites for social communication and sheds light on how some children with autism spectrum disorder can learn words and phrases but fail to develop true social language. This framework is then applied to a case example of a child called Henry, using data from 10-min videos of clinician-child interaction that were collected each week to evaluate the child's progress in social communication while working with his graduate-student clinician. Eye-tracking data also were collected as an indirect measure of eye contact. The data showed that Henry made progress in social engagement, reciprocal verbal interactions, and diversity of communicative intentions. In addition, eye-tracking data suggested an increase in eye contact commensurate with a typical age mate. Implications for social communication intervention are discussed.