MOTHER‐INFANT EXCHANGES: THE EPIGENESIS OF CONVERSATIONAL INTERACTION *

The present study reports research that brought a variety of approaches to bear on the description and analysis of one kind of joint performance of mother and child, starting in about the second month of life, which, in spite of the difference between the knowledge each brings to the interaction, seems to prefigure the adult interpersonal exchanges we call “conversations.” Here we see infants and mothers gazing at each other, as each smiles and vocalizes, apparently with pleasure and a sort of delighted courtesy. As with adult conversation, there is near-constant communication in one modality (visual) and intermittent, alternating communication in another. This is a description immediately recognizable to many (but not all) American mothers, and so it may cast light upon the potentialities of infancy, if not upon a necessary course of development. Sequences like these can be studied from a number of points of view, and have most frequently been used to extract evidence about mothering or about child development. Work by other researchers has established the importance of eye-toeye contact in early social development’ and the possibility of using operant conditioning techniques to increase the frequency of noncry infant vocalization: a mixed social stimulus serves to reinforce vocalization, but the influence of maternal vocalization (as contrasted with touch, visible presence, smiling, and so forth) is p rep~nderant?-~ Such research, however, which sums the total number of vocalizations over a period of time and considers the maternal response automatic, ignores the interplay between mother and infant in which each is affected by the behavior of the other and the two are coparticipants in an on-going event. This coparticipation is only part of the general question of mutual regulation of mother and child.5 One component of this is apparently based on synchrony of movement,b probably depending on a n orchestration of physiological rhythms,’ which may provide an essential starting point. The first section, THE RESEARCH, will be descriptive, with special attention to the development of patterns of conversation-like alternation and the evidence these may provide of the mutuality involved, and to the characteristics of the infant’s vocalizations, vocalizations that have not been systematically described, since most investigators d o not start from an interest in the interpersonal aspects of communication. In THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS we will broaden the scope considerably in order t o deal with the theoretical justification of the word “conversation” in the title, the needs for further theory and description, and the importance of this area of research for developmental psycholinguistics and the study of the etiology of communication disorders.