How the Infant-Caregiver Interaction Shapes Communication Development
We often underestimate the role of infants as communicators, especially before they start using words. Communication implies a back and forth between two people, so how do infants contribute to this back and forth? Well, in addition to spoken words, communication involves nonverbal aspects, such as gestures, facial expression and eye gaze. To understand how infants learn to communicate, we cannot look only at the infant’s behaviours or the language input provided by the parent or caregiver. Instead, the answer may lie in the shared verbal and nonverbal communication in infant-caregiver interactions. As stated in Two Minds Are Better Than One: Cooperative Communication as a New Framework for Understanding Infant Language Learning, infants and caregivers actively shape and are shaped by their daily social interactions. This article uses the term “cooperative communication” to describe the cycle of infant behaviour shaping parental language input and parent input shaping infant behaviour. For example, as infant babbling becomes more adult-like, parents preferentially respond to the adult-like sounds, and the infant produces more of the sounds that earn a response from the parents. In this way, their babbling develops to sound more adult-like.
This example brings up the concept of parental responsiveness, which refers to how quickly and appropriately a parent responds to an infant’s need, distress or attempt to get attention. In early infancy, this may be as simple as responding to an infant’s smile by smiling back. As an infant’s communication skills grow, parents change how they respond, once again highlighting cooperative communication in infant-caregiver interactions. For example, when a two year old child points out the window at a bird, the parent may respond by asking “What’s that?” to promote conversation because they know their child can say they see a bird. We also see here that communication may involve joint attention, times in which communication partners, such as infant and caregiver, are both attending to the same object and are aware of this shared attention. Joint attention provides an opportunity for parents to teach language. For example, extending the conversation about the bird to label it as a Bluejay. Infants are more likely to acquire a new word when the label is provided for an object they are attending to. It is more beneficial to language learning to follow an infant’s lead and talk about what interests them than to redirect their attention elsewhere or ignore their nonverbal initiations altogether.
The takeaway message here is that infant-caregiver interactions shape how both partners communicate. An infant's growing communication skills influence parental responses, and the parents’ verbal and nonverbal responses are important in shaping their infant's attention and language learning. The key for parents is to respond appropriately to communication attempts made my your infant, even if it is only a gaze or point out the window, and know that redirecting your infant’s attention actually weakens the effectiveness of a language learning moment. Cooperative communication, including responsiveness and joint attention, generates a more complete picture of how infant-caregiver interactions help infants become effective communication partners.
Reference:
Renzi, D. T., Romberg, A. R., Bolger, D. J., & Newman, R. S. (2017). Two minds are
better than one: Cooperative communication as a new framework for
understanding infant language learning. Translational Issues in Psychological
Science, 3(1), 19-33.
