Journal of Russian & East European Psychology

ISSN: 1061-0405 (Print) 1558-0415 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mrpo20

Sign Mediation in Processes of Formation and

Development

E. A. Bugrimenko & B. D. El'konin

To cite this article: E. A. Bugrimenko & B. D. El'konin (2001) Sign Mediation in Processes of
Formation and Development, Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 39:4, 20-33

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/RPO1061-0405390420

Published online: 08 Dec 2014.

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 Journal of Russian and East European Psychology
VOI.39, no. 4, July-August 2001, pp. 20-33.
02002 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1061-0405/2002 $9.50 + 0.00.

E.A. BUGRIMENKO
AND B.D. EL‘KONIN

Sign Mediation in Processes of

Formation and Development
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The term sign mediation in the context of Vygotsky’s cultural-

historical theory refers to a change in the nature and structure of a
mental process through a sign (the transition from the natural to
the cultural, from the direct to the mediated); at the same time, it
identifies the sign as a means used by man to organize his own
behavior. This special sense of superseding nature herself, which
the word mediation seems almost to hold onto by force through a
confluence of difficult-to-pronounce consonants (inevitably lost
when translated into other languages), is illustrated by certain pro-
cedures using dual stimulation, in which the sign acts as a means
for establishing new functional links between two series of paral-
lel stimuli (specifically, the triangle AXB, which Vygotsky used
to explain the relationship between instrumental and natural pro-
cesses; see, for example, 1982. P. 104). But along with this expla-
nation, Vygotsky drops a few words that give a glimpse of another
understanding of the psychological function of a sign as a means:
“In an instrumental act between an object and a mental operation
directed toward it, a new, middle link is inserted, a psychological

-
English translation 0 2002 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text 0 1994
by VestnikMosk. Univ., Ser. 14, Psikhologiia. E.A. Bugrimenko and B.D. El‘konin,
“Znakovoe oposredstvovanie v protsessakh formirovaniia i razvitiia,” Vestnik
Mosk. Univ., Ser. 14, Psikhologiia, 1994, no. 4, pp. 27-35.

20
 SIGN MEDIATION IN FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT 21

tool that becomes the structural center or focus, i.e., a factor func-
tionally determining all processes that constitute an instrumental
act” (1982. P. 105).
Thus, in what is done with the help of a sign one may perceive
not only a “linking” (establishing structural links) but also a
“breaking” (definition of the space “between”) of what had ex-
isted as something indistinguishable and indivisible before the
sign “moved in.” Is a sign that links the same as a sign that
disjoins? Or are these different psychological tools? Does a break
exist naturally, or is it provoked by the introduction of a sign?
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For the scientific tradition called Vygotsky ’s school, these ques-

tions may seem unexpected. We learn that a sign is a universal
means of learning that leads to development; and this, our prin-
cipal knowledge about it, is reinforced by ever newer discover-
ies of specific functions of signs in a learning experiment. But what
is the sense in contrasting two obviously mutually determining func-
tions of the sign? The sense lies in the open contrast between two
conceptions of the experimental-developmentalmethod (EDM): the
traditional one, according to which the purpose of the EDM is to
construct by means of signs situations for learning, i.e., to orga-
nize learning in such a way that it “carries development with it”;
and a second one consisting in the initiation and construction of
an act of development that may (but also perhaps may not) lead
to learning.
For the “learning activity” branch of Vygotsky’s school, the
participation of learning in development is a natural result of the
child’s construction of operations with objects within the logic of
concept formation. However, to be consistent students of this
school, one must explore even this naturalness, using the EDM,
and place it in a cultural-historical context. We reject any talk of
development as a natural flow of events, and shall simply try to
refine Vygotsky’s view with regard to those unique features of
human development in the narrow sense as determined by the re-
lationship between an ideal and a real form:

In no other type of development known to us do things happen in such

a way that at a moment when an initial form is falling into place, the
 22 E.A. BUGRIMENKO A N D B.D. EL‘KONIN

higher, ideal form that appears at the end of development has already
come into being and directly interacts with the first steps a child takes
along the path of development of this initial or primary form. Therein
lies the greatest singularity of child development as contrasted to other
types of development, among which we will never be able to discover
such a state of affairs-nor have we ever found it. (Quoted in D.
El‘konin, 1984. P. 395)
Thus, according to Vygotsky, an ideal form “already exists” in
a child’s development and “interacts” with the real form. This
axiom has been shared by all representatives of his school; but the
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answers to the question of how it exists and how it interacts given

in the writings of A.N. Leont’ev and P.Ia. Gal’perin indicate that
this approach has, in a sense, been reduced to the problem of de-
velopment as found in Vygotsky’s works. First, speaking about
development as a transition from a natural to a cultural (from a
real to an ideal) form of action, Vygotsky called attention espe-
cially to the nonevolutionary, conflictual nature of this process.
Thus, in [The development of higher mental functions], where he
analyzes arithmetic operations, he writes:
Extremely serious moments almost always arise in child development:
his arithmetic always clashes with another form of arithmetic, which
adults teach him. The educator and the psychologist should know that
a child’s assimilation of cultural arithmetic is conflictual.
In other words, development entails a certain break, a certain clash,
a kind of collision between those forms of operating with quantity a
child has worked out for himself and those he gets from adults. . . .
The moment when a child moves from a direct response to quantity to
abstract operations with signs is a moment of conflict. It causes a col-
lision between the previous line of development and the line that be-
gins with the learning of school signs. We cannot imagine that
development should move along a completely straight line. There are
many discontinuities, leaps, and turns. (1983. Pp. 202-3)

The supersession of an overt (natural) form of behavior, repre-

sented in Vygotsky’s writings as arupture and a conflict, is charted
in a classical formative experiment as the child’s gradual transi-
tion from external actions with objects to their compressed mean-
ing. Meaning, according to A.N. Leont’ev, is the “transformed ideal
 SIGN MEDIATION IN FORMATION A N D DEVELOPMENT 23

form of existence of the objective world, of its properties and rela-

tions discovered by joint and social practice, compressed in the
material of language” (1975. P. 131). Meaning is assimilated
through outward activity with objects in conformity with, but not
identical with, the models and the logic implicit in a work of cul-
ture. Not identical means that something requires a translation from
the language of the ideal form to the language of objective situa-
tions, by which the child, as he assimilates those situations, repro-
duces what is not directly patent in the object itself (concept, cultural
model, tool). This reproduction has an external character, as a dis-
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tributed (collective) and as an external activity with objects. Inter-

nalization is the gradual passing on of an action to a child, a
change in the “proportion of what is being done” between the
child and an adult, and takes place via the transition from exter-
nal props to language props, etc., as a result of which meaning is
formed.
Characteristic of this system of ideas is the illusion that there
exists a direct evolutionary path from a natural form of action,
through the organization of meaning via external objects, to the
ideal form (i.e., compressed meaning). This is reinforced by the
fact that, in descriptions of formative experiments (but not con-
cretely in the formative procedures!), omitted are those moments
of mutual orientation, searching, and testing that precede the child’s
understanding of what it is precisely he wants from an adult (the
discovery that what is one’s own and what pertains to others do
not coincide is a model action) and the adult’s understanding of
the relation of the sign tools he has introduced into the child’s
actions. The point is that the practice (and also the theory) of for-
mation of actions has always been interested in the effect of me-
diation (for a description of which the language of realization is
sufficient) and has almost never been interested in the sign’s me-
diator function in the narrow sense-i.e., how the encounter of a
natural process with the idea, or intent, of a cultural action takes
place: How are their relations constructed through signs, and in
what shifts, ruptures, and crises of action are they expressed? It is
interesting that formation (the dominant experimental method in
our child psychology, a method worked out in detail as a func-
 24 E.A. BUGRIMENKO AND R.D. EL’KONIN

tional-genetic model) has never been used to study the crisis peri-
ods of development, i.e., age-related transitions. Development in
the strict sense of the word has not been modeled, and the role of
sign mediation in it (not in the processes of learning some cultural
content) is still essentially unclarified.
The period of transition to another psychological age is marked
by the emergence into prominence of those sign structures in which
the child’s relation to himself and other people, his relation to his
own actions and to the actions of others, are expressed. At this
point, the ideal form is not the form of existence of the objective
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world crystallized in meaning, but an action of relating oneself to

another and seeing oneself as less perfect in relation to another.
The function of the sign in this case is to objectify the boundary
between the previous and the new forms of behavior. Mediation
through signs here is a way for the child to go beyond the naturally
formed stereotypes of his own behavior (which fully accords with
Vygotsky’s notions of the sign as a psychological tool directed
“inwardly”) and becomes a way to stop or interrupt an experience
that would naturally persevere.
Let us look at the age period of 6-7 years, traditionally regarded
as the period of transition from preschool to young school age. No
one doubts that this age marks a new boundary in life and activity.
But how is this exhibited in real terms? Perhaps play and directly
personal family relations cease when a child enters school? Of
course not. Is school the starting point for the unfolding of those
forms of actions and relations that are regarded as typical of the
school? Hardly. The modern preschooler encounters the group form
of exercises, their systematic nature, their classification into spe-
cific subjects (native and foreign languages, music, physical edu-
cation, etc.), and homework even in kindergarten and in various
groups for aesthetic, physical, or other kinds of development. To
mark the beginning of a new life, a new age, the school must offer,
in opposition to the empirical continuity of the child’s life, some-
thing that signifies a new birth. But what, exactly, what act serves
to draw the ideal line between previous and future experience of
the 6-7-year-old child? We should say that the act of renunzing-
the preschool child becomes the schoolchild, the educator becomes
 SIGN MEDIATION IN FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT 25

the teacher, and the group becomes the class-performs this func-
tion. The actualization of the future in the new name (“school-
child’) creates a gap of an internally contradictory “already but
not yet” in which a new way of life is laid out through the idea of
it (to be a schoolchild is something diflerent from being a pre-
school child, and a teacher is something diflerent from an educa-
tor), but is still not discernible in the outside world: being a
schoolchild relates to the child’s own being as an alien reality.
(The teacher’s existence outside the school is something completely
alien to the child, i.e., it is practically unimaginable. We are all
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familiar with the awkwardness caused in first-graders-especially

at the beginning of the school year-by a teacher’s display of or-
dinary human qualities, for example, that a teacher can “eat like
everyone else,” be someone’s mother, and have her own life out-
side the school.) Learning-literally, the making of ont’’s own-
the new reality of school is preceded by the experience of
discriminating the humdrum, everyday, “as always” from the un-
usual and “not as always” that puts in its appearance in the child’s
experiences and in the ostentatious, monkey-shine behavior char-
acteristic of the crisis at the age of seven.
Obviously, the transition from “not yet school age” to “no longer
preschool age” requires that the new name coincide with the new
reality. The new name, so to speak, frees a place for the appear-
ance of a new content to life. One can get an idea-from how
intensively the different realities of a child’s life are being renamed
(designated)-that a change in age period is approaching and that
the stage is being set for an act of development-which, however,
may also not come about, since the full structure of what we call
an event (B. El’konin, 1992, 1994)comprises not only the discov-
ery but also the de facto realization of an ideal form.
The reason why development might not come about may be a
hitch in the time and place of the appearance of a new content (for
example, a new system of relations): the recent period has seen
the appearance of various practical techniques for preparing
preschoolers for school life and, at the same time, has attempted
to “de-school” school life itself, so that the transition from play to
learning, from impulsive behavior to behavior that follows rules,
 26 E.A. BUGRlMENKO A N D B.D. EL‘KONIN

from directly personal family relations to frontal individual rela-

tions, is as untraumatic as possible for the child.
It is found that “trauma” (emotionally charged refusal to study,
infantilization, etc.) occurs precisely where the line between the
different ages is‘ not drawn distinctly and openly, e.g., by giving
the child a new name appellation and arranging his life in a new
way, but is camouflaged either by conspicuously preschool (or
nonschool) ways of managing 7-year-olds within the school or, on
the contrary, by introducing the class and lesson system of assign-
ments and the new form of relations, namely, “pupil-teacher” in a
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kindergarten environment.
Such phenomena as readiness for school, surmounting and stop-
ping the earlier experience, a new name (in the broad sense of the
term, a sign) marking the boundary of a new age phase, can surely
not be understood outside the context into which they enter at a
critical point in development (the age of 6 or 7). The problem of
school readiness, widely discussed in the literature of educational
psychology, has never yet been regarded as a problem of remov-
ing a child from the reality of his own actions or of superseding
this reality. The substitution and schematization of actions such as
training to model existing connections and relations in a specific
objective reality (mathematical, linguistic) are the usual center of
attention of compilers of curricula for the transition from preschool
to school age. Here, the sign, which is a substitute, a fixative of
actions, is convenient and understandable. Estrangement and ac-
tive supersession are another function of the sign; the unsuitabil-
ity of this function for describing, understanding, and experimental
reproduction derives from the fact that this function is accomplished
as an “inner movement” of the actor and is not embodied in any
object (an “external product”).
We have already pointed out that the experimental-developmen-
tal method, whose tradition is in the Vygotsky school, is especially
sensitive to the effect of sign mediation; but we shall add here that it
is not sensitive to its dynamic characteristics, to the “inner picture”
(Leont‘ev & Zaporozhets, 1945).But Vygotsky himself did not over-
look this aspect of the effect of a sign. Analyzing the transition from
nonvoluntary to voluntary attention, he writes:
 SIGN MEDIATION IN FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT 27

Let us now pause for a very brief look at a very complex phenomenon
that is not understood at the level of subjective analysis and that is
called the experience of effort. Where does it come from in voluntary
attention? It seems to us that it comes from the accessory, complex
activity we call taking control ofattention. It is quite natural that this
effort is not present when the mechanism of attention begins to work
automatically. At that point there are additional processes: there are
conflict and struggle; there is an attempt to steer processes of attention
along other lines. And it would be a miracle if all this were done with-
out an expenditure of effort, without major internal work on the part
of the subject, work that we measure in terms of the resistance en-
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countered by voluntary attention. (1983. Pp. 215-16)

We see that for Vygotsky mediation was not the construction of
a new language for one’s action (substitution of an action in a
sign), but the supersession of the natural forms of life, a critical,
tense, dynamic situation, in which a person reorganizes his own
corporeality, so to speak. In addition to the effect of mediation
through signs, Vygotsky also discussed what prepares the way for
the implantation of a sign-the experience ofefort, i.e., what hap-
pens in the gap between spontaneity and voluntariness, immediacy
and being mediated. We recall that universally known phenom-
enon of restraint of an impulsive movement at the moment a new
action is being formed: when we teach a child to use a potty, we
require that the child request it and give him a special word for
this; the child’s simple utterance of this word (addressed to an
adult) is an energetic effort to impede, to hold back impulse-an
effort at nonacting. We find that a tool (means) in terms of its
functioning is not an object of assimilation, but something that is
intercalated into behavior, as it were, which, with its resistance,
literally abruptly sunders two modes of action (“this way,” “not
that way”).
It is this side of themselves with which sign tools address the
child in experimental studies of a provisionally dynamic position
carried out by D.B. El‘konin and his pupils (Belous, 1978;
Fillipova, 1986; El’konin & Nedospasova, 1971; D. El’konin,
1978). The means for defining a position found in these studies,
i.e., the voluntary correlating of possible vantage points with an
object, in which the child acts not with objects themselves, but
 28 E.A. RlIGRIMENKO AND R.D. EL’KONIN

with the relation between the seer and the seen, was extremely
effective: 5-6-year-olds displayed a very high level of intelligence
(using Piaget’s indices) in this learning session. The essential as-
pect of assuming a provisional position in these experiments is the
opposition between what is physically visible and what is provi-
sionally proposed. Let us describe one more experimental situa-
tion reproducing the basic features of a positional action.
In one of Piaget’s well-known problems-multiplication of relations-
a child is given a series of figures (squares) successively varying in
two parameters at once: size and color (from big to small, from dark to
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light). Children aged 6-7 years old usually focused on only one at-
tribute (most often the size of the figure) in coping with this problem,
disregarding the change in brightness. The device used to place the
disregarded attribute at the center of the child’s attention was as fol-
lows: the experimenter asked the child to put on some imaginary eye-
glasses through which he would see only the size of the objects, whereas
they all looked the same in terms of color. Then the initial procedure
was repeated: for each figure in the series of samples (see diagram),
the child had to find a precise equivalent in a comparative set contain-
ing all possible variants of square figures within preassigned limits
(big squares were dark gray, light gray, and bright; middle-sized squares
were dark gray, light gray, and bright, etc.). Each choice made from
the position of “looking through special glasses” required a voluntary
effort to overcome direct vision. Thus, to the experimenter’s proposal
to find, in the comparative set, “precisely the same” square as in the
first box, a child had to answer by pointing o u t all the figures of this
size, disregarding their differences in brightness. If the provisional
position was not assumed, the child’s choice was reduced to one fig-
ure, to the largest and darkest square.
The effect of positional action is exhibited in the transition to ordi-
nary vision without imaginary glasses, in which the child, after doing
a problem involving multiplication of relations several times, at the
same time retains the variation in the two parameters of the object-
color and size-which enables him to complete the incomplete series.
But the manifestations of the positional action itself are given not as a
result, but in the living diagram of the action, in a child’s behavior.
For example, the experimenter, with a make-believe movement of
the hand, puts the imaginary eyeglasses on the subject (Egor, V., 7; 8)
and explains how they work.
Experimenter: Find me the one exactly like this one (first square in
 SIGN MEDIATION IN FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT 29

the diagram) among these figures (points to the comparative set).

The subject finds a large black square in the comparative set (i.e., a
figure that coincides totally with the sample), holds it for a long time
in his hands, turns to the experimenter, and asks: “Eyeglasses on?’
Experimenter: Yes; now you have eyeglasses on. The subject diffi-
dently places the square next to the standard, looks at the figures in the
comparative set, takes one of them-a large light square-and again
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turns to the experimenter: “Do I have eyeglasses on?’

Experimenter: Yes, you still have eyeglasses on.
The subject places the figure he has just chosen next to the first, but
then moves them apart, and finds another two big squares of different
brightness in the comparative sample and joins them with the second
figure.
In moving to the next standards (second and third squares on the
diagram), the subject acts as follows: first he finds a figure that is
identical in color and size, and then, after putting it aside or even cov-
ering it with his hand, picks from the comparative set the other figures
corresponding to this special “noncolor” vision.

In this fragment of the experimental session, it is easy to see the

“experience of effort” associated with voluntary “nonattention” to
the color characteristics of the object. The ban on natural vision
imposed by the provisional position has the effect that the child
begins to work not only with the objects (standards, and the set of
objects for comparison) but also with the stereotype of his own
behavior, and begins to strive to overcome it using such expres-
sive actions as stepping back, so to speak, and covering with his
hand the figure corresponding to the standard in color. It is inter-
esting that when the child turns to the experimenter, he is seeking
confirmation that his own position (“Do I have glasses on?”) is
correct, not simply an answer to the question of what figures he
has selected from the set for comparison. The position itself be-
comes the question (I am seeing “in this way” or “not in this way”),
and this distinguishes fundamentally the transitional forms of an
action in which a whole field of new experience is displayed (po-
 30 E.A. BUGRIMENKOAND B.D. EL’KONIN

sitional relation) from the established forms in which this field is

embedded.
The device of placing an action in a positional “setting” makes
the specific content of the interpsychic stage of mediation overt:
before it is passed on, a tool (cue card, meaning) must in some
way be addressed, i.e., faced in terms of the reality of the child’s
present action. The practice of training is usually described as if
this act of facing off has already happened and that a gradual ab-
straction from the actual setting of the action is possible. In con-
trasting to this practice the attempt to initiate a positional
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relationship (an action with a vantage point and the object of that
vantage point), we have tried to move from a presumption that the
ideal form addresses the material accessories of an action to actu-
ally organizing it as such.
At this point a special set of problems arises for the discussion
of development and mediation through signs. Essentially this dis-
cussion begins where the transition “between” is sought: between
where the ideal form is not yet addressed to the material accesso-
ries of the action with regard to which it looks complete and where,
i.e., the functional genesis, has now already begun.
According to many experimental data, what is specific to this
interval is that behavior is, in a certain sense, divided. Let us take
some classic examples: observing how a child learns to cope with
an action with an object, A.V. Zaporozhets (1986) and D.B.
El’konin (1978) noted that it was difficult to distinguish the action
in the strict sense (transformation of the situation) from the subject’s
gestures; manipulations with things at the same time appeared as
gestures of addressing another person nearby who, for the child,
was “just what was needed,” namely, the sense and the meaning of
actions, their ideal form.
As a study of the positional relation in 6-7-year-olds showed
(B. El’konin, 1994), phenomena in which an action is sundered
sometimes have the flavor of clearly absurd, superfluous opera-
tions motivated by nothing whatsoever. It was found that this vis-
ible nonproductivity and, at the same time, clear expressiveness
of a child’s action are evidence of an active transition from a play
action to a positional action. Thus, in special ritualized actions, a
 SIGN MEDIATION IN FORMATlON A N D DEVELOPMENT 31

child will take note of and affirm a new experience, which has
never happened to him before (“the world of positions”). Para-
doxical though it may seem, it is in these “meaningless,” nonpro-
ductive actions, which, however, are addressed simultaneously to
himself (to his experience) and to an adult, that the instrument of
a new vision offered to the child (it may be imaginary eyeglasses,
as in our example, or any other object in which a specific view of
things is objectified) acquires the significance ofa means or a
tool.
We should mention that we are obliged to the cultural-histori-
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cal theory of development not only for our idea about the special
efficacy of sign instruments-this has long been a common no-
tion-but also for the by no means traditional understanding of
the fact that the significance, the role, of a sign as a psychological
instrument is not fixed beforehand, ready-made. The significance
of a means or a tool is always given to the sign; it cannot be the
property of the thing itself. And it is this that turns stimuli qua
means into the signs and symbols of culture; it is this that makes
them nonnatural. Meaning is acquired in the interchange between
minds, indeed, in no other way. In the particular act in which mean-
ing is ascribed and acquired, i.e., in how and for what reason it is
given and acquired, lies concealed the entire riddle of mediation,
the main question, the “nerve,” the “sensitive” part of both the
cultural-historical conception and its offshoot, the activity theory
of the mind. The question is not how a sign works after it has
become a means or a device, and, of course, not how it worked
before that. The question lies in the very genesis, the formation, of
the free space where a stimulus becomes a means or, more broadly,
where a thing is superseded and recast as meaning. This is also the
meeting place of a real and an ideal form. It is here that the prob-
lem of the birth of the subject of action, i.e., the problem of devel-
opment, lies.
We should add that a complete and functioning sign, when ap-
plied to a behavioral situation, requires not ideas, but rules for
linking up with the particular conditions. A sign’s “life” according
to rules leads not to the development of an action, but more fre-
quently to the contrary-to its getting bogged down in present
 32 E.A. BUGRIMENKO A N D B.D. EL’KONIN

circumstances, in a “functional fixation of past experience” that is

the special equivalent of the bio-organic, natural form of behavior
that Vygotsky had in mind in his first studies of mediation.
Our statements here about mediation through signs will obvi-
ously raise quite a few questions in cultural-historical theory since
they concern not only the clear and familiar postulates of this
theory but also Vygotsky’s position, which he never stated firmly,
and which was not formulated in clear definitions and extended
descriptions.
The attempt to restore and to underscore the shades of mean-
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ing, the “imminent” logic of Vygotsky’s statements, which his fol-

lowers omitted, reflects two, in our view, mutually exclusive
circumstances: on the one hand, that those research areas and theo-
ries that constitute the Vygotsky school are, in a certain sense,
complete, thoroughly worked through, and have joined the ranks
of classics before our very eyes; and, on the other hand, that the
key concepts and ideas of the cultural-historical theory (such as
the “interpsychic form of an action,” “objectification,” mediation
through signs, etc.) have lost the explanatory power they had for
us until quite recently.
Encountering this “critical point” in the evolution of develop-
mental psychology after its passage through Vygotsky’s school,
we have attempted to find some points of support for our view of
the processes of formation, development, and sign mediation:
-to move from evolutionary constructions (the theory and prac-
tice of formation) to pinpointing manifestations of nonevolutionary,
crisis aspects of transitions;
-to determine the dynamic characteristics, the “inner picture”
of the assumption of an ideal form that gives the processes of fa-
miliarization and assimilation of cultural contents the character of
events;
-to distinguish in sign mediation the moments at which mean-
ing is discovered-the acts in which a particular way of seeing
things is altered, e.g., the interruption and supersession of preced-
ing experience and the processes in which meaning is captured
and the sign performs the function of linking the past and the present
situation of an action;
 SIGN MEDIATION IN FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT 33

-to make the mediating function of the sign in the strict sense,
not the results of mediation, an object of discussion.
Designing experimental situations in which the intermediate
position of the sign between the child and the adult could be
represented phenomenally and study of the forms of this media-
tion can, in our view, be one of the products of the experimental-
developmental method, which hitherto has focused on processes
of mediation.

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