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Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How children use their environment to learn
Edited by Caroline F. Rowland, Anna L. Theakston, Ben Ambridge and Katherine E. Twomey
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 27] 2020
► pp. 11–38

Learning how to communicate in infancy

| University of Sheffield

Just like other baby apes, human infants make it their business to stay in safe contact with their caregivers. The difference is that humans do this not just by holding on for dear life, but by ensuring their caregivers are in psychological contact with them. To this end, many of the most important communicative developments take place within the first two years of life. In this chapter we will review how physical mutual responsiveness gives way to the back-and-forth of proto-conversation, where caregivers respond to hiccups, coos and sneezes as if they were speech. Infants discover that they can make sounds and gestures in order to engage others and take turns. They become able to make demands of people, bring things to their attention and ask questions of them. Once they have mastered doing so non-verbally, they soon learn that they can use words for the same purposes (even though they don’t understand words as intersubjectively agreed symbols until sometime later). These communicative developments far outstrip those of any other animal on the planet. And yet it seems that it is precisely the relatively slow development of human infants that affords our species unique mode of communication. Newborns, equipped with a desire to be with others and some basic attentional preferences, are set up to learn from their social environment and thereby guarantee their entry into human culture.

Article outline
  • Preface
  • The newborn’s preparedness for communication
  • Early face-to-face interaction and primary intersubjectivity
  • Turning towards the outside world
  • The transition to intentional communication
  • The developmental roots of human communication
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 17 September 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.27.01mat
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