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.

Socialization and early communication: age birth to 6 months 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.