Chapter five

 Language is a communication tools whose development depends on the prior development of communication.  Language is a social tool.*  A child’s knowledge of give-and-take exchanges and nonlinguistic signaling equip him or her to interpret or ‘crack the code” used in the exchange.

 Language presents only a portion of a larger interactional pattern that reflects the way we socialize our children.  Babies become human beings because that is the way they are treated. HOW??*  From these dialogues, children learn initiation and termination of the conversation, turn-taking patterns, verbal- non verbal elements.

 Communication is maintained because a mother is socially sensitive to the effect of her behavior on the infants and tailors her speech to the task and to her child’s abilities.*  Much of the early paralinguistic dialogue occurs in specific situations (i.e. situation- dependent). **  Infants learns the conventions of conversation because of its mother’s behavior. Mother and child engage as partners in a dialogue.

 In other words, a child is capable of expressive communication long before he/she develops formal verbal language. Early intention gradually attain a linguistic form.

 Perceptual and cognitive abilities suggest that a neonate is ‘pre-wired’ for communication.*  Newborns prefer visual stimuli. ** Infants selectively attend visual stimuli. A caregiver interprets eye contact as a sign of interest or attention.  Newborns search for the human voice and demonstrate pleasure or mild surprise when finding the face of the sound source.***

 A newborn will stop crying to attend to its mother’s voice. In turn, the mother will stop doing almost anything else to attend to her infant's voice.  The newborn facial expression demonstrate the high degree of maturity of the facial neuromuscular system, resulting in a neonatal expressions resembling displeasure, fear, anger, joy,..etc. AGAIN, the caregiver infers meaning where non may be present.

 Infants head movements also have high signal value of a caregiver. (p.118)  Newborns have individual personalities that affect the patterns of interaction. Differences may include an infant’s general mood, intensity of activity, sensitivity to stimuli…etc.

 A neonate also has a limited set of behaviors that will help him to begin to communicate. In fact, they started communicating unintentionally prior to birth, generally with kicks to express discomfort.  an infant’s state of wakefulness influences adults’ behaviors. A caregiver learns the appropriate times to play with the neonate and to leave him/her alone. In other words, the caregiver learns the signals for engagement.

 I month age: interactional sequence (gaze).  6 weeks age: infants are able to coordinate the amount of time spent gazing to the social situation.  Infants are responsive to their caregiver’s voice and face.**  # * * two weeks: they can distinguish their mother’s voice from the rest of the voices. An infant will turn to his/her mother and fix its gaze upon her eyes or mouth. The infant’s facial expression will be one of interest or mild surprise followed by a smile.  3 weeks of age: this smile of recognition which is called “social smile”.  3-6 weeks of age: infants begin to smile in response to external stimuli such as human face and eye gaze.

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