2001 - Infant Intersubjectivity. Research, Theory, And Clinical Applications

J. Child Psychol. Psychiat. Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 348, 2001

Cambridge University Press

' 2001 Association for Child Psychology and PsychiatryPrinted in Great Britain. All rights reserved

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Infant Intersubjectivity : Research, Theory, and Clinical Applications

Colwyn Trevarthen and Kenneth J. Aitken

The University of Edinburgh, U.K.

We review research evidence on the emergence and development of active self-and-other awareness in infancy, and examine the importance of its motives and emotions to mentalhealth practice with children. This relates to how communication begins and develops ininfancy, how it influences the individual subjects movement, perception, and learning, andhow the infants biologically grounded self-regulation of internal state and self-consciouspurposefulness is sustained through active engagement with sympathetic others. Mutual self-other-consciousness is found to play the lead role in developing a childs cooperativeintelligence for cultural learning and language. A variety of preconceptions have animatedrival research traditions investigating infant communication and cognition. We distinguishthe concept of intersubjectivity , and outline the history of its use in developmentalresearch.

The transformingbodyandbrainofahuman individual grows inactive engagementwithanenvironment of human factorsorganic at first, then psychological or inter-mental.Adaptive, human-responsive processes are generated first by interneuronal activity withinthe developing brain as formation of the human embryo is regulated in a support-system ofmaternal tissues. Neural structures are further elaborated with the benefit of intra-uterinestimuli in the foetus, then supported in the rapidly growing forebrain and cerebellum of theyoung child by experience of the intuitive responses of parents and other human companions.We focus particularly on intrinsic patterns and processes in pre-natal and post-natal brainmaturation that anticipate psychosocial support in infancy. The operation of an intrinsicmotive formation (IMF) that developed in the core of the brain before birth is evident in thetightly integrated intermodal sensory-motor coordination of a newborn infants orienting tostimuli and preferential learning of human signals, by the temporal coherence and intrinsicrhythms of infant behaviour, especially in communication, and neonates extraordinarycapacities for reactive and evocative imitation. The correct functioning of this integratedneural motivating system is found to be essential to the development of both the infantspurposeful consciousness and his or her ability to cooperate with other persons actions andinterests, and to learn from them.

The relevance of infants inherent intersubjectivity to major child mental health issues ishighlighted by examining selected areas of clinical concern. We review recent findings onpostnatal depression, prematurity, autism, ADHD, specific language impairments, andcentral auditory processing deficits, and comment on the efficacy of interventions that aimto support intrinsicmotives for intersubjective communicationwhen these are not developingnormally.

Keywords: Infant intersubjectivity, parent-infant communication, developmental disorders,pathologies of empathy, therapies.

Abbreviations: ADS: adult-directed speech; DTV: double video link; F0: fundamentalfrequency; IDS: infant-directed speech; IMF: intrinsic motive formation; IMP: intrinsicmotive pulse ; PDD: Pervasive Disintegrative Disorder; PRC: period of rapid change.

Introduction

This is the first Annual Research Review on infancyresearch for the JCPP. The time is ripe for an examinationof changing conceptions of first steps in human psycho-social growth.

The idea that normal human sensitivity for psycho-logical impulses in other persons may have a basis ininherent cognitive and emotional systems of the brainspecialised for this function has received attention inpsychology recently, much of it sceptical. Given thepredominance of individualist, constructivist, and cog-

Requests for reprints to: Professor Colwyn Trevarthen, De-partment of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 7 GeorgeSquare, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, U.K.

nitive theory in empirical psychology, this is hardlysurprising. The central problem in early development ofthe mind has been taken to be object awareness, notperson awareness. Nevertheless, there is evidence thateven newborn infants, with their very immature thoughelaborate brains, limited cognitions, and weak bodies, arespecifically motivated, beyond instinctive behaviours thatattract parental care for immediate biological needs, tocommunicate intricately with the expressive forms andrhythms of interest and feeling displayed by otherhumans. This evidence of purposeful intersubjectivity, oran initial psychosocial state, must be fundamental for ourunderstanding of human mental development. It will alsobe crucial for accurate interpretations of the influencesof nature and nurture in the baffling spectrum of psycho-social pathologies in children, as for the development of

3

4 C. TREVARTHEN and K. J. AITKEN

effective treatment strategies, be they therapeutic oreducational.

Observation and experimentation in the motor, sen-sory, and cognitive developments in early childhood hasgrown spectacularly since the 1960s, stimulating modelsof developmental change in perceptual discriminationand representation, operational thinking, skills and mem-ory, and attempts to relate these achievements to braindevelopment, as well as to the design of artificial neuralnets that simulate cognition and learning. With thesuccess of precise experimental methods developed tomeasure infant object-perception and cognition in con-trolled conditions, the everyday social-interpersonal fac-tors of development and the intrinsic motives thatnormally regulate them, for which new evidence wasobtained in the 1970s by micro-descriptive studies, havebeen less regarded. Or they have been explained inreduced physicalistic terms as secondary effects of socialcontingencies, or as the outcome of some kind of acquiredintellectual process that can read others minds. Nowresearch on infants special awareness of persons, andtheir active influence over caregivers behaviour, is havinga comeback, along with a renewed interest in the motivesand emotions that animate consciousness and self-awareness in humans and animals.

We believe that the existence of specialised innatehuman-environment-expectant social regulatory andintersubjective functions in the infant mind has beenfirmly established, and argue that the correspondinganticipatory motives constitute an essential frameworkfor the regulation of all human cognitive development;guiding, limiting, extending, and evaluating what theindividual can discover inside and outside his or herbody. Related, though psychologically simpler, processesof intersubjective regulation appear in all animal speciesthat are both highly social and at first dependent onintelligent parental care. The human case is unique in itsadaptations, which guide children through dialogic ex-change of emotive and referential narratives in body-mimesis to language and learning of a cultural accumu-lation of well-reasoned knowledge and strategic technicalskills. The emotional investment of the child in this learning how to mean is of primary importance inclinical work with children, as well as in their education.

A cognitive description of psychological developmentin the individual human baby, focusing on the processesthat take in perceptual information about objects and thephysical situation, is certainly possible.However, it wouldappear to be a logical category error to infer thatinteraction between subjects can be explained by decom-posing their behaviours and perceptual discriminationsinto cognitive components that are adapted to guide oneagent in engagement with things that have no psycho-logical anticipation and no adaptive behaviour.

The social intelligence of the infant is evidently aspecific human talentan inherent, intrinsic, psycho-biological capacity that integrates perceptual informationfrom many modalities to serve motive states. Moreover,this capacity is a necessary prerequisite, although not initself a sufficient cause, for a child to go throughpsychological development of the kind that leads to anddepends on cultural learning. Such a premise leads to adifferent research agenda in clinical psychology from onethat views the cerebral mechanisms of social behaviour,and the emotions that regulate it, as a product ofemerging, or constructed, modular components ofgeneral representation, or of processing in cognition

(Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; Piaget, 1954; Rutkowska, 1993,1997; Spelke, 1991), or uni-modal perceptual pattern-recognising mechanisms (Bremner, Slater, & Butter-worth, 1997; Johnson & Morton, 1991). We believe thatthe prevailing logic needs to be reversed; that objectcognition and rational intelligence in infants, andtheir perceptual preferences, should be viewed as theoutcomes of a process that seeks guidance by person-perception and through communication with equivalentprocesses, of cognition-with-intention-and-emotion, inother persons.

Evidence will be given from a number of clinical areasfor the effects of early difficulties in interpersonal func-tions that degrade subsequent developments, includingthose rational, experience-dependent skilful, and moreutilitarian aspects of conscious life subsumed under thetitles of social cognition, theory of mind, andpragmatics of speech and language.

Normal Intersubjectivity in Early Infancy

The Discovery of Innate Intersubjectivity in Proto-conversations and Games with Young Infants

The theory of innate intersubjectivitythat the infantis born with awareness specifically receptive to subjectivestates in other personswas put forward 25 years ago toaccount for observations made descriptively or etho-logically from films of the behaviours of infants in naturalinteraction with their mothers, who were attempting toengage the infants in face-to-face chat, or playing gameswith them (Trevarthen, 1974, 1979, 1998a). In the 1970s,researchers in different fields reported the findings of filmstudies of live interactions between adults and infants afew months old (Bateson, 1971, 1979; Brazelton, Kos-lowski, & Main, 1974; Stern, 1971, 1974, 1977; Tronick,Als, & Adamson, 1979). They were impressed with thesimilarities of timing and expression between thesesimplest, intuitive human encounters and informal con-versations between adults. The techniques of conver-sational analysis, with accurate measurement of thetiming of the contributions by adult and infant, broughtstatistical confirmation of this similarity (Beebe, 1982;Beebe, Jaffe, Feldstein, Mays, & Alson, 1985; Beebe,Stern, & Jaffe, 1979; Feldstein et al., 1993; Fogel, 1977,1985a; Stern, 1971). It was M. C. Bateson (1971, 1975,1979) who termed the mother-infant interactions proto-conversations.

Further study revealed that this natural sociability ofinfants, engaging the interest, purposes, and feelings ofwilling and affectionate parents, serves to intrinsicallymotivate companionship, or cooperative awareness, lead-ing the infant towards development of confidence,confiding and acts of meaning, and, eventually, tolanguage (Trevarthen, 1980, 1982, 1987, 1988, 1990a;Trevarthen & Hubley, 1978; Trevarthen, Murray, &Hubley, 1981). The infants communicative motivation,and the intuitive parenting that fosters it, have beenidentified with the special human aptitude for culturallearning, including language learning (Adamson & Bake-man, 1991; Bakeman & Adamson, 1984; Bruner, 1976,1983; Butterworth & Grover, 1988; Eckerman, Whatley,& McGee, 1979; Halliday, 1975; Locke, 1993; H.Papousek & Bornstein, 1992; H. Papousek & Papousek,1977, 1987; Rommetveit, 1979, 1998; Ryan, 1974;Tomasello, 1988; Tomasello & Farrar, 1986; Tomasello,Kruger, & Ratner, 1993; Vygotsky, 1978). The infants

5INFANT INTERSUBJECTIVITY

need for communication animates the initial self-otherawareness and reception of motives and emotions in theintersubjective messages that underlie all languageahuman sense , as Donaldson (1978) called it, thatemerges in progressively more powerful forms throughthe course of infancy (Bra/ ten, 1998;Reddy,Hay,Murray,& Trevarthen, 1997; Rommetveit, 1998; Ryan, 1974).The earliest meanings are conveyed to the infant ortoddler nonverbally or paralinguistically by vocal andgestural expression in natural social situations, at thesame time as language is being used by older interactantsto convey referential information and to specify purposes,experiences, thoughts, and recollections. Regulation ofthis primary human communication depends on an innatevirtual other process in the infants mind (Bra/ ten,1988a, b, 1998).

Researchers found that as early as 2 months, infantsand mothers, while they were looking at and listening toeach other, were mutually regulating one anothersinterests and feelings in intricate, rhythmic patterns,exchanging multimodal signals and imitations of vocal,facial, and gestural expression (M. C. Bateson, 1975,1979; Beebe et al., 1979, 1985; Brazelton, Tronick,Adamson, Als, & Wise, 1975; Fogel, 1977, 1985a, b,1993a, b; Fogel & Hannan, 1985; Fogel & Thelen, 1987;Mayer & Tronick, 1985; Stern, Beebe, Jaffe, & Bennett,1977; Stern, Jaffe, Beebe, & Bennett, 1975; Tronick, Als,& Brazelton, 1980; Weinberg & Tronick, 1994). Mothersand fathers were behaving in an intensely sympatheticand highly expressive way that absorbed the attention ofthe infants and led to intricate, mutually regulatedinterchanges with turns of displaying and attending. Theinfant was thus proved to possess an active and im-mediately responsive conscious appreciation of theadults communicative intentions. This is what was calledprimary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen, 1979). The dis-tinction between subjectivity and intersubjectivity in earlyinfancy was defined as follows:

Subjectivity and intersubjectivity: a definition of terms

Human beings understand one another intimatelyand at many levels. To analyse this ability of personsto act together and to share experience in harmony,we have first to view communication in relation tothe private activities of conscious, purposeful action.All voluntary actions are performed in such a waythat their effects can be anticipated by the actor andthen adjusted within the perceived situation to meetcriteria set in advance. Interpersonal communicationis controlled by feedback of information, as in allvoluntary behaviour. But there is an essential differ-ence between a person doing things in relation tothe physical world and the control of communicationbetween persons. Two persons can share control,each can predict what the other will know and do.Physical objects cannot predict intentions and theyhave no social relationships.

For infants to share mental control with otherpersons they must have two skills. First, they mustbe able to exhibit to others at least the rudiments ofindividual consciousness and intentionality. Thisattribute of acting agents I call subjectivity. In orderto communicate, infants must also be able to adaptor fit this subjective control to the subjectivity ofothers : they must also demonstrate intersubjectivity.By subjectivity I mean the ability to show bycoordinated acts that purposes are being consciously

regulated. Subjectivity implies that infants masterthe difficulties of relating objects and situations tothemselves and predict consequences, not merely inhidden cognitive processes but in manifest, intel-ligible actions (Trevarthen, 1979, pp. 321322).

Perturbation tests, by the still or blank face or doubletelevision replay procedures, discussed below, furtherdemonstrated that a 2- to 3-month-old infant was emo-tionally aware of a mothers contingent and emotion-ally appropriate behaviour, and actively engaging with it(Murray & Trevarthen, 1985, 1986; Trevarthen,1993a, b; Trevarthen et al., 1981; Tronick, 1989;Tronick, Als, Adamson, Wise, & Brazelton, 1978), andthese findings are confirmed by more recent investigations(Nadel,Carchon,Kervella,Marcelli,&Re! serbat-Plantey,1999).

Longitudinal film study of behaviours recorded insemicontrolled lab}studio conditions that favoured closeobservation revealed an orderly age-related transform-ation of the infants motives through the middle of thefirst year, toward increasingly intricate, precise, andselective coordination with the mothers richly inflected,rhythmically patterned, and repetitive expressions ofcommunication and dramatised actions of play (Beebe etal., 1979, 1985; Bruner & Sherwood, 1975; Fogel, 1977;Jasnow & Feldstein, 1986; Mayer & Tronick, 1985;Ratner & Bruner, 1978; Stern, 1971; Stern et al., 1977;Stern & Gibbon, 1980). The babys increasing interest inobjects was observed to grow in some competition withthe earlier developed motives for protoconversationalplay, and led, around the middle of the first year, to theelaboration of more lively games with objects. Just beforethe end of the first year, there was a rather suddendevelopment of joint interest of mother and infant in theirsurroundings, triggered by the infants emerging curiosityabout the timing and direction and focus of attentionsand intentions of the mother (Hubley & Trevarthen,1979; Pecheux, Ruel, & Findji, in press). This change ininfants experience, and acceptance of joint attention tothe world, clearly has momentous consequences insubsequent learning, and profound effects on the waysmothers act with and speak to their infants.

Parallel study of the development of younger infantsorientationsactivities aimed to engage objects andphysical events (tracking and reaching, grasping, andmanipulating)clarified the differences between sub-jective motives that led them to experience, for themselves,the sensations and affordances of their own bodies and ofthings, and the intersubjective motives that were drawingthem into games and self-other regulations of a strictlyinterpersonal kind, in which the babies had to reactalertly to the expressions of purpose and emotion in theirpartners (Trevarthen et al., 1981). It was confirmed thatthe differing motives for these two kinds of objectiveforobject awareness or doing with things, and for person-awareness and communicating with persons (seeTrevarthen, 1998a)were, indeed, undergoing divergentand periodically competing development during the firstyear, leading, at around 9 months after the infants birth,to integration in the new form of cooperative inter-subjectivity (person-person-object awareness), which wasnamed secondary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen & Hubley,1978).

It is significant that the evidence for person aware-ness and a capacity for intersubjectivity came fromdescription in detail, from frame-by-frame analysis with


accurate measurement of the timing, of how infantsmoved their bodies, especially their expressive organs, inresponses, both contingent and provocative, to theexpressions of another person. Importantly, the be-haviours selected to define the infants intersubjec-tivitythe ways the infants look, express their feelings inface and voice, how they gesture and move in rhythmiccycles to accept or reject contactwere homologous withbehaviours that are essential to the elaborate inter-subjectivity of all collaborative intentional activity inadult society, including live conversational language.They are regulated and negotiated purposefully andemotionally, by expressive and receptive processes en-gaging many modalities simultaneously (Bra/ ten, 1998;Dore, 1983; Fernald, 1989; Jaffe, Stern, & Peery, 1973;Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1982; Murray & Trevarthen, 1985;Stern, 1974; Stern et al., 1977; Stern, Hofer, Haft, &Dore, 1985; Trevarthen, 1978, 1984a, 1993a, b;Trevarthen, Kokkinaki, & Fiamenghi, 1999; Weinberg &Tronick, 1994).

By 1 year a baby can not only communicate directlywith human expression without language, but can alsoenergetically share complex arbitrary experiences, boldlydisplaying to familiar persons an individual, sociallyadapted personality. The baby attends to and imitatesconventional vocalisations and gestures, as well as mak-ing orientations to and handling objects that otherpersons use, imitating their actions (Adamson & Bake-man, 1991; Bakeman & Adamson, 1984; Bates, 1979;Bretherton, McNew, & Beeghly-Smith, 1981; Bruner,1976, 1983; Butterworth, 1999; Butterworth & Grover,1988; Eckerman et al., 1979; Halliday, 1975, 1979;Hubley & Trevarthen, 1979; Locke, 1993; Ryan, 1974;Tomasello, 1986; Tomasello & Farrar, 1986; Trevarthen,1987, 1988, 1990a, 1992; Trevarthen & Hubley, 1978;Trevarthen & Logotheti, 1987; Trevarthen et al., 1981;Uzgiris, 1981, 1999). Motivation to regulate fluentperson-person-object awareness, joint attention, andmutually adjusted intentionality, all at once, is comingto the fore at this age (Trevarthen & Hubley, 1978).

Details of the expression of the developing motives thatdrive the earliest communications of humans are sum-marised as follows. In the gentle, intimate, affectionate,and rhythmically regulated playful exchanges of proto-conversation, 2-month-old infants look at the eyes andmouth of the person addressing them while listening tothe voice. In measured and predictable cycles of responseto regular time patterns in the adults behaviour, theinfant moves its face, which it cannot see or hear, andreacts with movements of face, hands, or vocal system tomodified patterns of adult vocal expression that it isincapable of mimicking, and that have not been availablein that form in utero. The communicatively active handsof young infants may make expressive movements inrhythmic coordination with a persons speech (as was firstnoted by Condon & Sander in 1974), and this can occurwhen the baby has been blind from birth, and thus neverseen its hands, or anyone elses hands (Tnsberg &Hauge, 1996; Trevarthen, 1999a). Thus we may concludethat the infant has a coherent psychoneural organisationthat specifies the timing and form of body movements.This organisation can react with appropriate dynamicchanges to another persons dynamic expressions, match-ing their rhythms and accents. Evidently the responses ofthe infant are made expressive by internally generatedmotives and emotions that resemble those carried in theadult expressions. Infant and adult can, for a time,

sympathise closely and apparently equally with oneanothers motive states, using similar melodic or prosodicforms of utterance and similar rhythms of gesture. Thisentails an absorption of the adults motivations into anaffectionate intuitive parenting mode that tends to mimicthe infant and that releases in the adult a specialised,emotionally coordinated musicality of voicing, withanimated but sympathetic and joyful facial expressionsand dance like postural, gestural movements that matchvocal expressions, and affectionate and playful touchingand moving of the infants hands, face, or body (H.Papousek & Papousek, 1977, 1987; Stern, 1974, 1985,1993).

Intersubjectivity of Neonates and Foetuses

It has been assumed in medical science and psychologythat a human newborn, lacking coherence of psycho-logical representation even of itself as a subject, cannotdistance itself perceptually or conceptually from theadult who cares for it. That, consequently, the relation-ship with the mother is one of symbiotic fusion, to usethe term employed by Mahler, Pine, and Bergman (1975).In the same way, the British Object Relations School ofpsychoanalysis, while developing a framework for ap-preciating the emotional needs of infants, took it asevident that newborn is confluent emotionally with themother, and emerging to self-awareness within herrational consciousness in a growing attachment to herperson (Stern, 1985). With the exception of Fairbairn(Grotstein & Rinsley, 1994), object relations theory(Bion, 1962; Guntrip, 1971; Klein, 1952; Winnicott,1965) holds that the young baby has no consciousness, noseparate ego, no representation of self distinct from theother. These ideas recall ancient philosophical inferencesabout the primacy of reason, the role of learning byimitation, and the opposition of reason and emotion(Kugiumutzakis, 1998, p. 88).

In fact, while neonates are undoubtedly endowed withreflex panic responses that serve physiological main-tenance and survival (Panksepp, 1998a), if a newborn isalert, rested, free of stress, and responded to sympath-etically, voluntary behaviours appear that are well-coordinated, perceptive, and specifically adapted to exciteand regulate an engagement with the autonomous expres-sions of interest and emotion of another person, all ofwhich makes the behaviours intensely rewarding for anew mother or father, who feel they are interacting witha human person (Murray & Andrews, 2000; Van Rees,Limburg, Smulders, & Kloosterman, 1992). The express-ive behaviours in affectionate chat and play have noimmediate role in the regulation of the neonates physio-logical state, comfort, or survival. They are distinct frommaternal breast-feeding, stroking, holding, rocking, vocalcomforting, and the like. The caregiver responds toneonatal signals that are very different from appetitivemovements, distress cries, or gestural signs of fear, anger,or fatigue. The interactions are calm, enjoyable, anddependent upon sustained mutual attention and rhythmicsynchrony of short utterances which include, besidevocalisations, touching and showing the face and hands,all these expressions being performed with regulatedreciprocity and turn-taking. Newborn and adult spon-taneously display a mutually satisfying intersubjectivity(Kugiumutzakis, 1998; Trevarthen et al., 1999).

A comparable intimacy with mutual imitation can be


seen in interspecies communication between a humanadult and a newborn chimpanzee (Bard, 1998; Bard &Russell, 1999), which proves that face-to-face trans-mission of the basic intersubjective motives is notrestricted to humans. The state-regulating communi-cative behaviours and reactions of infants resemble theneeds for parental attention shown by the helpless youngof many other mammals (Blass, 1994, 1996; Carter,Lederhendler, & Kirkpatrick, 1997; Hofer, 1990; Mc-Kenna & Mosko, 1994; Panksepp, 1998a; Panksepp,Nelson, & Bekkedal, 1997; Panksepp, Nelson, & Siviy,1994; Rosenblatt, 1994; Schore, 1994; Suomi, 1997).

By recording changes in their heartbeat with attentionto novel events, where they chose to look, or by causingtheir head rotations, leg movements, or sucking to triggerstimuli, it has been possible to show in experimentalsituations that newborns are sensitive to expressions ofemotion in body movements and touching, voice, orfacial movements (Bower, 1982; DeCasper & Carstens,1981; Eisenberg, 1976; Jusczyk, 1985; Lipsett, 1967; H.Papousek, 1967). However, the most striking evidence foran innate protoconversational readiness comes fromintended imitations and provocations of newborns inclose reciprocal interaction with adults who are seekingto make their behaviours interesting for, and contingentwith, the infants signs of attending. Infants only a fewhours old are capable of expressing communicativecapacities adapted for psychological self-other regulation(Aitken & Trevarthen, 1997; Als, 1995; Blass, 1999;Brazelton, 1984; Brazelton et al., 1974, 1975; DeCasper& Carstens, 1981; DeCasper & Fifer, 1980; Heimann,1998; Kugiumutzakis, 1998, 1999; Meltzoff, 1985a;Meltzoff & Moore, 1977, 1994, 1997, 1998; Nagy &Molna! r, 1994; Reissland, 1988; Trevarthen, 1979, 1997a;Trevarthen et al., 1999; Zeifman, Delaney, & Blass,1996). The infants act assertively or apprehensively inappropriate coordination with the assertive phases orwatchful apprehensive states of a sympathetic partner(Trevarthen et al., 1999). This active involvement incommunication of rudimentary intentions and feelingsconfirms that the human mind is, from the start,motivated not only to elicit, guide, and learn frommaternal physical care to benefit regulation of the infantsinternal biological states, but also for cooperative psycho-logical learningthe mastery of socially or inter-personally contrived meaning specified in intelligentreciprocal social engagements (M. C. Bateson, 1979;Bra/ ten, 1998; Dore, 1983; Halliday, 1975, 1979; Hubley& Trevarthen, 1979; Newson, 1979; H. Papousek &Papousek, 1977; Ratner & Bruner, 1978; Ryan, 1974;Tomasello et al., 1993; Trevarthen, 1980, 1987,1988, 1994; Trevarthen & Hubley, 1978; Trevarthen &Logotheti, 1987; Trevarthen & Marwick, 1986).

In short, infant survival and development depends oncommunication with a caregiver to service the babysneeds for an emotional attachment, but also to maintainand develop an intimate emotionally expressed com-panionship in changing purposes and conscious ex-periences (Trevarthen, 1998d, in press). The infantsmind andbodyhas special functions adapted to anticipatethis development of the imagination of meaning (seeFig. 2).

Even an infant born more than 2 months before termcan begin to share dynamic protoconversational motivesin precisely regulated rhythms of purposeful movementand investigative awareness by exchanging facial ex-pressions, vocalisations, and gestures of the hands with a

sympathetic partner (Trevarthen et al., 1999; Van Rees &DeLeeuw, 1993). Learning tests that examine preferentialorienting or autonomic regulations of newborns provethat perceiving the mothers rhythmic vocal expressionsof motive state from her speech can begin in utero, manyweeks before birth (DeCasper & Spence, 1986; Fifer &Moon, 1995; Hepper, 1995; Lecanuet, 1996). Her charac-teristic patterns of speech can be identified by hernewborn immediately. Recognition of the visible ap-pearance of the mothers face is acquired within hours offull-term birth, aided by the newborns coherent orintegrated capacity for interest in interaction with thefeelings behind the other persons facial expressions andvocalisations (Bushnell, Sai, & Mullin, 1989; Field,Cohen, Garcia, & Greenberg, 1984; Field et al., 1983;Field, Woodson, Greenberg, & Cohen, 1982; Goren,Sarty, & Wu, 1975; Heimann, 1989, 1998; Heimann,Nelson, & Schaller, 1989; Heimann & Schaller, 1985;Kugiumutzakis, 1993, 1998, 1999; Maratos, 1982;Meltzoff, 1985a; Meltzoff & Moore, 1977, 1994; Nagy &Molna! r, 1994; Reissland, 1988; Zeifman et al., 1996).

The complex adaptive structure of the foetal humanbrain, and notably the peripheral organs and neuralsystems of social or interpersonal perception and ex-pression, determine directions and limits to future ac-quisition of skills or knowledge by a child (Als, 1995).Although it has been shown that prematurely born infantscan imitate facial expressions (Field et al., 1983; Kugiu-mutzakis, 1985, 1998), it appears likely that the auditorylearning of foetuses and the vocal imitations of prematurenewborns may be related to the precocity of the auditorysense and its special reception of other persons ex-pressions (Mehler et al., 1988). Development of auditionmay be inhibited after birth by the sudden acceleration ofdevelopment of the visual system that occurs in earlymonths (Lecours, 1982). Longitudinal data (Kugiu-mutzakis, 1999, pp. 42, 44, 48) indicate that vocalimitations may be declining immediately after birth, asimitations of seen mouth movements increase, and thenvocal imitations pick up after 2 months.

Imitation by infants is not mere reproduction orrepetition of movements made by another individual, andit serves interpersonal functions, not just acquisition ofmotor skills and expression (Kugiumutzakis, 1993, 1998,1999; Uzgiris, 1981, 1984). It is, even for newborns, anemotionally charged mutual influence of motive states inwhich certain salient expressive actions of the other areidentified and repeated to further an ongoing communi-cation (Nagy & Molna! r, 1994, 1997). Imitative responsesoccur at a moment in the stream of interaction where theycan act as affirmations, acceptances, or commentarieswith respect to accentuated displays of the other person(Trevarthen et al., 1999). Older infants and toddlersimitate to display and reinforce friendship or affiliation,showing great sensitivity to pleasure and praise shown byfamiliar companions. But even in young infants, imi-tations serve to qualify an attachment relationship(Meltzoff & Moore, 1994), possibly to identify anindividual person as an object of heightened affecti.e.of love or admiration.

The manner of imitating proves the natural complexityand specificity of the infants motives for human contactand communication. The imitative reactions recognisecommunication, as a hand-shake or a head-nod doesbetween adults in conversation, and they have a furtherpeculiar feature. An inventory of the actions that neo-nates can imitate reveals a rather bizarre set : e.g. large


tongue protrusions, exaggerated opening of the mouth oreyes, looking back over the head, holding up a hand,extension of one finger or two fingers, single vocal sounds(vowels) emitted in a rhythmic burst. All these appear tobe forced or emphatically marked innovations, notnormal spontaneous currency in mutual affective regu-lation, such as ordinary smiles, staring, crying, orfrowning. The imitations are emitted after prolongedattention and with effort, and they show improvement inaccuracy over a series of repeated attempts. Where it hasbeen found that neonates imitate expressions of emotion(Field et al., 1982), these have been responses to theexaggerated performances of an actress, not normalcontingent responses in reciprocal communication. Thisappears to indicate that, even at this age, imitation is partof a motivation specialised for purposeful negotiationand learning of new or arbitrary social habits or con-ventions, in the form of behaviours that have beenisolated and given emphasis in the stream of engagement.Further research on the timing of neonatal imitations isneeded to establish this curious point.

Intuitive Parenting and Maternal Speech:Sympathetic Emotions Evoked by the InfantsExpressions of Feeling, Initiative, and Curiosity

The very distinctive manner of an affectionate adultsvocalisations to a young baby has now been analysed indetail. Motherese or infant directed speech (IDS) hasdefined rhythmic and melodic features as well as voicingqualities. It is organised in repeated phrases, and tends tocreate slowly changing, cyclic narratives of emotion. Thesimilarity of this speech and vocal play to music and tothe rhythmic and rhyming forms, phrases, and verses ofpoetry has drawn researchers attention, and led to aconcept of preverbal or subverbal musicality as afundamental basis for communication of motives andfeelings (Malloch, 1999; H. Papousek, 1996). Infantshave been found to have astonishing powers of discrimin-ation for subtle features of musical sounds and melodicforms, especially as these are represented in the inflectionsof a mothers voice (see below). These features are evi-dently manifestations of a fundamentally innate pro-cess of emotional physiology, by expression of which aprimary level of intermental communication is estab-lished between human subjects.

The dynamic narrative envelopes of a mothers utter-ances, their pitch contours, and other dynamic qualities,have been identified as necessary alimentation for theinfants developing self-awareness and consciousness ofagency (Beebe & Lachmann, 1988; H. Papousek &Papousek, 1977, 1987, 1989; Stern, 1974, 1985, 1993). Onthe other hand, the extraordinary precision of the infantsmirroring, even with a restricted vocal repertoire, hasbeen taken as further evidence for an innate capacityfor such on-line communication (Beebe et al., 1985;Stern & Gibbon, 1980; Stern et al., 1975, 1977, 1985;Trevarthen et al., 1999). Infants, even newborns, canexactly synchronise with certain salient moments in theadults message by gesture or utterance, and the vocalemissions can be matched in pitch and quality (timbre)(Malloch, 1999). There clearly is a sensitive two-waymirroring of the emotional values of expression in spite ofthe great difference in maturity between the participants.

Speech directed to infants with concern for their

interest, like speech addressed sympathetically to pets(Burnham, 1998), or to very old people who often thinkslowly and are hard of hearing, has exaggerated, butmodulated, expressivity. It clarifies the feelings, interests,and intentions of the speaker, and it minimises theremembering of meanings of words. This talk is under-standable as effective communication only if it is acceptedthat even young infants are as sensitive to the feelingsbehind consciously regulated well-motivated utterancesas an old person or a cat. As Bateson, an anthropologistand linguist, pointed out, it is a form of human com-munication that is related not only to education inthe forms and meanings of language, but also to therhythms and melodies of religious ritual and communion,and traditional healing practices (M. C. Bateson, 1979,pp. 7476).

Comparison of parents speech to young infants indifferent languages confirms that there are universalrhythmic and prosodic features in the expression ofhuman feelings and sympathetic interest (Fernald, 1992a;Fernald & Simon, 1984; Fernald et al., 1989; Grieser &Kuhl, 1988; M. Papousek, Papousek, & Symmes, 1991;Stern, MacKain, & Spieker, 1982). Thus, for example,motherese or IDS in both a tonal language (Mandarin)and in a nontonal language (English or German), com-pared to adult-directed speech (ADS) in either language,has higher pitch (fundamental frequency, F0), larger F0range, shorter utterances and longer pauses, fewer syl-lables per phrase, and less phrase time}sample time(Grieser & Kuhl, 1988; M. Papousek et al., 1991).Thanavisnuth and Luksaneeyanawin (1998) report simi-lar features in Thai mothers speech to their infants.Rising contours, used by parents to elicit infant attention(Stern, Spieker, Barnett, & MacKain, 1983), are similarin English and Mandarin (M. Papousek et al., 1991), andthis form of utterance is more effective in eliciting andmaintaining infant attention than falling pitch (Sullivan& Horowitz, 1983). Infants prefer approving rather thandisapproving intonation (M. Papousek, Bornstein,Nuzzo, Papousek, & Symmes, 1990) ; they show morepositive affect to this way of speaking (Fernald, 1993) andare more interactive, interested, and emotionally positiveto IDS (Werker & McLeod, 1989). Adults, too, judgerole-play better from speech in the IDS register.

Maternal speech has often been studied as if it were justan instructive register of language, an aid for the infant topick up words and sentence grammar. But cats pre-sumably do not understand words, and nor do 2-month-olds. With toddlers or the aged, linguistic communicationmay also be part of the effective function of this way ofuttering, but its obvious attractiveness and regulatoryeffects with the youngest infants can have little to do withthe grammatical or semantic purposes of language. Vocalcommunication addressed to infants is, for the infant andlargely for the adult too, nonreferential, in the sense thatit does not matter that it may specify any reality or objectoutside the human contact itself. It is intersubjective at afundamental level. It serves to respond to or affirm theinfants eagerness to become involved in proto-conversation, which is a nonverbal discourse regulated bydynamic relational affects, and a narrative sense oftransforming feelings.

Research on IDS, at first reacting to the theory of aninnate language acquisition device, which argued thatlanguage input to infants is so linguistically impoverishedthat it couldnt possibly teach grammar (Chomsky, 1965),sought to demonstrate that mothers do provide a graded


instruction in features of language (Snow & Ferguson,1977). Then acoustic speech analysis led to the dem-onstration that speech to infants has higher pitch, widerpitch excursions, slower tempo, shorter utterances, andlonger pauses (Cruttenden, 1994; Fernald&Simon, 1984;Stern et al., 1982), and it was claimed that the trainingwas perceptual rather than linguistic. But infantsclearly already have perceptual biases and attentionalpreferences that favour awareness of parental speech(R. P. Cooper & Aslin, 1990; Fernald, 1985; Gleitman,Gleitman, Landau, & Wanner, 1988; Pegg, Werker, &McLeod, 1992; Werker & McLeod, 1989). Thus threedifferent functions have been attributed to the wayadults talk to infants : this speech engages attention(M. Papousek et al., 1991; Stern et al., 1982; Sullivan& Horowitz, 1983), communicates affect, facilitatingsocial interaction (Fernald, 1989, 1992a; Kitamura &Burnham, 1996, 1998a; M. Papousek et al., 1990;Werker & McLeod, 1989), and facilitates language acqui-sition (Fernald & Mazzie, 1991; Hirsh-Pasek et al.,1987).

Experimental Tests of Infants Emotions inProtoconversation

The motives and emotions of protoconversation withinfants under 3 months of age have been tested byperturbation experiments, situations that have been con-trived to obstruct or distort the rhythmic traffic ofexpressive signals and contingent and sympatheticresponses between infant and adult. Two procedures havegiven valuable evidence on what infants expect from thebehaviour of a conversational partner, and how they actwhen the adult fails to meet these requirements. Theyconfirm that the interaction is generated by coregulation,coconsciousness, and contingent and reafferent mutualregulation in a complex dynamic system wherein theexact course of events is emergent or not defined inadvance (Fogel, 1993a, b; Fogel & Thelen, 1987; Tronick& Weinberg, 1997). They also show that the young infanthas expectations of the emotional quality of the en-gagement and the normal contingencies of a sympath-etic adult response, and that these emotions changein ways that affect the adult, regulating positivelytowards a happy encounter, and defending against fail-ure of contact, by appealing with negative emotionalexpressions for appropriate remedial action to repaircommunication.

The still or blank face test (Murray, 1980; Murray &Trevarthen, 1985; Trevarthen et al., 1981; Tronick et al.,1978) requires a mother who has established a proto-conversational interaction with her infant to arrest hermovements on a signal from the experimenter, and simplylook at the infant without any reaction to what the infantdoes. This commonly results in the infant showing asuccession of appeals for communication by smiling,vocalising, and gesturing, punctuated by increasinglysober staring at the mother, then emission of signs ofavoidance of eye-contact and distress. The behaviour hasbeen charted by micro-description and proved by stat-istical analysis and to be a coherent emotional reactionthat shows the infant is disturbed or made unhappy bythe mothers unresponsiveness. Indeed, the infants be-haviour assumes the configuration and interpersonaltiming of an expression of sad avoidance, an expressionwhich, in an older person, we would not hesitate to call

distressed embarrassment or shame (see below for adiscussion of the nonbasic emotions of infants).

A second experiment was designed to deal with theobjection that the infant was simply affected by themothers sober face and inactivity (Murray, 1980;Murray & Trevarthen, 1985; Trevarthen et al., 1981). Adouble video (DTV) link was set up so that infant subjectsa few weeks old (less than 3 months) and their motherscould see each other and communicate by seeing oneanothers face expressions and hearing vocalisations live.Once good, happy communication was obtained, aportion of the recording of the mother approximately 1minute in length from an animated and playful period ofthe encounter was rewound and replayed to the infant.The projection of the mothers behaviour to the infantwas exactly as before, but the physical recording was not,in any reliable way, reacting contingently to what thebaby was expressing at any moment. Here infants showedoccasional accidental interaction with the taped behav-iour of the mother, confusion when she failed to respondin time and appropriately, then prolonged distress andavoidance as in the still face experiment. It takes time forthe infant to recover from this perturbation when themother resumes normal sympathetic communication, oris on-line again, as was the case in the still face experiment(Weinberg & Tronick, 1996). Replay of the infantsbehaviour to the mother in the DTV apparatus causes herto feel something is wrong, and different mothers ex-perience different emotions and make different verbalevaluations, all uncomfortable, when the infant appearsnot to connect.

Replication of this DTV replay experiment confirmsthat 2-month-olds are highly sensitive to the timing andemotion of a mothers expressions in communication(Nadel, Carchon, et al., 1999). Evidently the infant, at 6to 12 weeks of age, is able to anticipate and join asympathetic conversation, and is distressed by mis-timed maternal expressions, no matter how joyful andplayful they may be. As we shall explain, this finding isresolutely contested by proponents of the view thatinfants under 3 or 4 months (or even much older) lack(have not yet constructed) a coherent, intentional self ,and therefore do not perceive agency in another person,and cannot be sensitive to the purposeful contingency ofanother persons communicative responses (Rochat,Neisser, & Marian, 1998). According to this theory, theself-awareness required for awareness of the other as anagent is a product of acquired social cognition (Lewis,1999)

Research on the effects of maternal postnatal de-pression, which causes the mother to express herselfwithout pleasure, with flat affect, and with erratic timingof behaviours that do not engage with the infantsbehaviours, leads to the same conclusion as the per-turbation experiments, as is discussed further below.Young infants seeking communication from a depressedmother are affected by unsympathetic and inappro-priately timed maternal behaviour (Breznitz & Sherman,1987; Field, 1992; Lundy et al., 1996; H. Papousek &Papousek, 1997; Tronick & Weinberg, 1997), themothers self-referred, unresponsive state (Murray,Kempton, Woolgar, & Hooper, 1993) and the quality ofspeaking that lacks musicality (Robb, 1999). Theybecome distressed and avoidant and may develop alasting depressed state that affects communication withpersons other than the mother (Field, 1992; Lundy et al.,1996).


Changes in older infants reactions to the two per-turbation tests show that a capacity to withstand dis-engagement of a conversational game without distressincreases with the infants increasing alertness and curi-osity for the environment at large. Infants over 4 monthseasily engage in agile visual investigation of surroundings,and they can use this new interest to escape an unres-ponsive mothers gaze. Whereas the 2-month-olds appearto be trapped in the stressful encounter and usuallybecome seriously disturbed, the older infants are muchless concerned by brief unresponsiveness of the mother(Biglow, MacLean, & MacDonald, 1996; Hains & Muir,1996) ; they simply avoid looking at her (Muir & Hains,1999; Trevarthen, 1984a, 1990a). Further age-relatedchanges in infants resistance to distress and separationwill affect how they behave in any situation where themothers responses are unusual, and when they are olderthan 6 months infants often regard the still face test as anentertaining game (Trevarthen, 1998a, p. 40). The testswith 2-month-olds engage the protoconversationalmotives that are active in primary intersubjectivity ,before motives for investigative looking and manipu-lating have become strong, and before the infant hasdeveloped a robust self-confidence in game playing,teasing, and showing off.

Developments of Intersubjectivity in the FirstYear : Age-related Events and Changing Parental

Responses

Perceptuomotor Maturation in Infancy: IncreasingBody Awareness and Transitions in Motive andEmotion

Infants consistently show conspicuous age-relatedchanges, not only in their physical size, acuity ofperception, and motor strength, but in the coordinationof their movements for different purposes, their per-ceptual discrimination and attentional preferences, andtheir affectionate and cooperative engagements withcaregivers. These changes are reflections of trans-formations in brain function that have intrinsic causes.They are clearly also consequences of experience andlearning, about the body and of the world and objects,and therefore dependent on the kind and quantity ofexperiential input. Infants learn recognition of humansignals from before birth, and at all ages they reactstrongly to the emotional support they receive from otherpersons, and the attentions given to their interests andactions. But they also have their own powerful internalimpulses andmotivations, and these are always importantfactors in development of the infants awareness andmotor coordination, and in their responses to self-generated experience, as well as to care or teaching.

Figure 1 summarises the evidence we have concerningage-related changes in infants behaviour. These appearto express periods of rapid change (PRCs) in infantspsychological motives and capacities for action, cog-nition, and communication (Trevarthen, Aitken, &Plooij, 2000). Four main epochs can be defined, and theseappear to reflect changing balance in three principle kindsof intrinsic motive: (a) ergotropic, for attending to theexternal world with the aid of motor adjustments of thebody and selective use of the senses ; (b) trophotropic, forregulation of the internal autonomic or visceral state ; and(c) communicative, this last being effective in regulating

both attachment, serving the developing infants tropho-tropic needs, and companionship, by which experiencesand skilful actions directed to the environment are sharedand learned socially (Trevarthen, 2000; and see Fig. 2).The ergotropic}trophotropic distinction in animal motiv-ations was first made by Hess (1954) on the basis ofphysiological effects of brain stimulation. For modernevidence on motive systems of the mammalian brain seePanksepp (1998a).

Experimental cognitive psychology has focused prin-cipally on the ergotropic, environment-assimilating func-tions of the infant as an individual perceiver and actor,exploring and using objects, observing events, and ac-quiring skills of perceiving and acting. Consequentlyprimary importance has been given, first, to the veryconspicuous changes in visual focus at 4 to 6 weeks, thenin attention and manipulation with advances of posturalcontrol, visual orienting, and discrimination, and reach-ing and grasping around 3 and 4 months (e.g. Rochat &Striano, 1999). A second major change in cognitioncomes toward the end of the first year as the infant, on thethreshold of independent locomotion, shows more de-liberate interest in pursuing the kind of purposes whichadults see as intentional and becomes more capable ofsolving problems of the ways objects interact and can beused together.

These changes, at these three ages, have been taken bydevelopmental authorities as the beginnings of variousfunctions of consciousness, object concepts, volition, andself-awareness. The program of developments in objectcognition has been assumed to set the pace and strategyfor social cognition, a product that must incorporatethe capacity for relational emotions, empathy, andintersubjectivity (e.g. Bahrick & Watson, 1985; Baron-Cohen, 1994; Gergeley & Watson, 1999; Izard, 1978,1994; Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979; Mahler et al., 1975;Piaget, 1954, 1962; Rochat & Striano, 1999; Rothbart,1994; Schore, 1991; Sroufe, 1996; Stern, 1985; Toma-sello, 1993; Yarrow et al., 1984; Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, Wagner, & Chapman, 1992). An alternativeview holds that self-awareness and emotional maturitycomes principally with language and social training, afterinfancy (Dunn, 1994; Lewis, 1987, 1992, 1993). Suchconclusions can only be supported if the ways in whichyounger infants, including newborns, react purposefullyand emotionally to the environment are disregarded, andtheir reactions to the communicative signals from otherpersons are explained as reflexive or mindless . Webelieve that the changes through the first and second yearor childhood are more accurately seen as developmentaltransformations in prenatally drafted motives that areadapted for intelligent life in the company of othersubjects, not the first appearance of the adaptive be-haviours.

Research on the social development of infants focusedon the supposed dependence of communication oncognitive development, or on the dependence of the childfor emotional development on parental regulation, and,on imitation, takes the childs self-awareness to be aconstruct built of experiences acquired concerning howother persons react to what the child does, inferringpurposes where they did not exist (Kaye, 1982). Theincreasing self-consciousness of the infant in the second 6months of life has been taken as evidence for thebeginning of a representation of other individuals inten-tions, or intersubjectivity. Advances in the dynamics ofinteraction and in social signalling are supposed to reflect


Regulation of sleep, feeding and breathing. Innate pre-reaching.Imitation of expressions. Smiles to voice.

Fixates eyes with smiling. Protoconversations. Mouth and tongue imitationsgive way to vocal and gestural imitations. Distressed by still face test.

Person-Person games, mirror recognition.Smooth visual tracking, strong head support. Reaching and catching.

Imitation of clapping and pointing. Person-Person-Object games. Accurate reach and grasp.Binocular stereopsis. Manipulative play with objects. Interest in surroundings increases.

Playful, self-aware imitating. Showing off. Stranger fear. Persistent manipulation.Babbling and rhythmic banging of objects. Crawling and sitting, pulling up to stand.

Cooperation in tasks; follows pointing. Declarations with joint attention. Proto-language.Clowning. Combines objects, executive thinking. Categorises experiences. Walking.

Self-feeding with hand. Beginning of mimesis of puposeful actions,uses of tools and cultural learning. May use first words.

A

B

C

D

E

F

GFigure 1. Top : In protoconversation, a two-month-old infant and a mother communicate by many modalities of perception andexpression, transmitting information about intrinsic motive rhythms and emotions, principally by eye-to-eye contact, voice, facialexpression and gesture. Middle : In the first 18 months of life there are marked changes in the infants consciousness of other personsand in their motives for communication, without language. Several major transitions can be observed in self-and-other awareness atparticular ages. These lead the child toward cooperative interest in actions and objects, and cultural learning. Below : Research studiesthat have made detailed longitudinal observations at sufficiently frequent intervals have found evidence for major periods of rapidchange (PRCs) in motor coordination, perceptual abilities, and communication. All may be described as elaborations of the meansby which the initial purposeful, consciously regulated, and intersubjective motives of the newborn infant may be employed to further

learning. The sources of the data on which this summary is based are cited in Trevarthen, Aitken, and Plooij (2000).


change to the social scaffolding offered to the infant asparents are more playful, presenting game routines, withthe infants initiative in these changes of communicationbeing regarded as consequences of perceptual and mo-toric developments. The infants realisation that otherpersons are like me (Mead, 1934) is taken to come asa consequence of acquired contemplative or metacog-nitive functions (Leslie, 1987), developing expectationsregarding the dynamic vitality features of other persons,and, especially, an emerging sense of variable contingencyin their responses (Bahrick & Watson, 1985; Gergeley &Watson, 1999; Watson, 1984).

While not denying the importance of learned regu-lations in the management and recollection of experi-ences, and the influence parents may play through theirinterpretation of infants expressions of emotion andbehavioural responses , we see the conspicuous de-velopments in infants self-consciousness and sociabilityin this period of games as continuous with, and de-veloping from, the rhythmically patterned intersubjectivemotives that were present and active in the newborn. Webelieve that development is fostered best when parentsrespond with perceptive sympathy to the motives andfeelings infants express to them.

As the infant gains in alertness, discriminative aware-ness, and power of movement in the early weeks, turningmore to explore the environment and manipulate objects,exchanges with parents become more lively (Trevarthen,1990a, 1998a; Trevarthen & Hubley, 1978). After 3months protoconversations give way to body games,nonsense rhymes, nursery chants, and songs and to ritualplay routines involving body bouncing, hand-clapping,tickling, peek-a-boo, and the like (Bruner & Sher-wood, 1975). These are always strongly rhythmic, withregular phrasing and highly predictable repetitions andresolutions of emotional energy or excitement (Tre-varthen, 1999a). They involve the easy substitution andmatching of forms of expression in different modalities(hand gestures, voice sounds, face expressions, looks, andhead orientations), which Daniel Stern called inter-modal fluency, in the emotional complementation thathe describes as affect attunement (Stern et al., 1985).By 4 months or so, infants are clearly interested in andresponsive to the adults changing mood and expressionsof excitement, surprise, pleasure, or displeasure, and,with familiar persons, they can appreciate complexteasing games (Nakano & Kanaya, 1993). Imitationgames between infants and their mothers and fathers, orbetween infants, are emotional, and usually very pleasur-able (Fiamenghi, 1997; Reddy et al., 1997; Trevarthen etal., 1999). Older infants, when they are caught inunfamiliar circumstances, orient purposefully to checktheirmothers emotions (Klinnert, Campos, Sorce, Emde,& Svejda, 1983). It follows that any implication that theparent is giving organisation to the infant by scaf-folding an erection of immature moves should bequalified by the observation that the adult is oftenassiduously tracking the infants varying mood withimitations, and that the infant can take the role ofprovocateur or teaser (Reddy, 1991). The infant can bethe one who attunes to and accompanies the parent withnicely synchronous gestures or vocalisation, even show-ing anticipation of salient events, such as the prolongedvowel at the end of a phrase or stanza (Malloch, 1999;Trevarthen et al., 1999). As in protoconversation, thereare frequent occasions in games or songs when the infanttakes the role of leader, while the mother responds.

Communicative Musicality in The First Year

The subtleties of early preverbal interaction are beingstudied in detail by methods for objectively assessing theprosody and melody of infant-directed vocalisations andmusical sounds, and recording infants orientations andpreferences to such sounds. The evidence is that infantsare selectively attracted to the emotional narrativescarried in the human voice, and that they are excited toparticipate in a shared performance that respects acommon pulse, phrasing, and expressive development.Infants respond with synchronous rhythmic patterns ofvocalisations, body movements, and gestures to match orcomplement the musical}poetic feelings expressed by themother. As infants become more energetic and alert,mothers songs and games become more lively. Theydevelop ritual forms which are often repeated, to thegreat satisfaction of infant and parent. The mood of themothers performance changes with the state of alertnessand humour of the baby, and reacts with a soothing,calming mode when the infant is tired or distressed. Thesongs can modulate the emotional state of the infant andthe extent to which he or she engages in communication.

By 6 months of age, in laboratory discrimination tests,infants respond differently to play songs and lullabies,types of song that are easily recognised by adults. Playsongs are associated with increased alertness to theexternal world and joint attention, whereas lullabiesresult in more self-focused infant behaviours (Rock,Trainor, & Addison, 1999). These developments parallel,or accompany, changes in the ways parents talk to olderinfants, conspicuous changes occurring in both musicalforms of play and in the affective and directive forms ofspeech in different languages, first towards 3 months, andthen between 9 and 12 months (Kitamura & Burnham,2000; Thanavisnuth & Luksaneeyanawin, 1998; Tre-varthen & Marwick, 1986). There are interesting sexdifferences in these developments, indicating not onlythat females may be developing slightly ahead of boys incommunication, but that they are more responsive of andstimulating to both affective and directive functions ofmothers speech after 9 months (Kitamura & Burnham,2000; Masur, 1987; Papaeliou, 1998; Thanavisnuth &Luksaneeyanawin, 1998).

Just as infant-directed speech and singing tends to behigher-pitched, slower in tempo, and more repetitious incontent than talk addressed to older children or adults(Trainor, 1996; Trehub et al., 1997), infants responses tofemale singers confirm that parents propensity to interactwith infants using a higher vocal range is paralleled by theinfants preference for higher-pitched singing (Trainor &Zacharias, 1998). However, further investigation hasshown that infants are not interested so much in the pitchof singing per se. They are perceiving and mirroring thenarratives of emotion in the voice, as we explain below.

The intuitive time-patterns and motive contours ofprotoconversation and mother-infant games can be car-ried by any means of sensory-motor contact. A recentstudy focused on the importance of variations in maternaltouch and hand gestures during interaction with infants(Stack & Arnold, 1998). Sixty mothers were videotapedwith their 5"

#-month-old infants during four phases of

interaction. At certain times they were instructed to useonly touch and gesture, at others to attend to the infantsface, and at others to engage in normal interaction withtheir infants using vocalisation as well. Mothers were ableto engage successfully with their infants using touch and


gesture alone. This is in accord with studies of therhythmic tactile forms of communication that familiarand experienced partners use to make contact withprofoundly mentally handicapped children or youngadults (Burford, 1988, 1993; Burford&Trevarthen, 1997;Trevarthen & Burford, in press), as well as the findings ofresearch into the most effective ways of supporting self-regulation, communication, and cognitive developmentin infants and children with sensory loss, including thoseboth deaf and blind (Tnsberg & Hauge, 1996).

Research on infants attentions and preferences bringsevidence that the essential features of what we may callthe intrinsic motive pulse (IMP) of musicality (Trevar-then, 1999a) are possessed by infantsthey are shown inplay with adults, or when infants are responding toartificial fragments of musical sound in laboratory tests.Infants listen with perceptive preferences to the melodiesof speech, singing, and music, and songs and music makethem move in rhythm and register interest and happiness(Baruch & Drake, 1997; Demany, 1979; Fassbender,1996; Fridman, 1980; Lynch, Short, & Chua, 1995; H.Papousek, 1996; M. Papousek, 1994, 1996; M. Papousek& Papousek, 1981; Stern, 1971, 1974, 1993; Stern et al.,1977; Trehub, 1987, 1990; Trehub, Trainor, & Unyk,1993; Trehub, Schellenberg, & Hill, 1997; Trevarthen,1986a, 1987; Trevarthen et al., 1999; Zentner & Kagan,1996).

Twenty-five years ago, Condon and Sander (1974)reported entrainment of newborn arm movements tothe syllabic rhythms of adult speech in any language.Since the infant can generate the same arm rhythmswithout any external guide (Trevarthen, 1974, 1984b, c ;Von Hofsten, 1983), this coordination is evidently not apassive locking-on of the infant to the adult pace-maker , but a sympathetic and flexible cross-modal, oramodal (aud6itory to proprioceptive, and possibly tovisual) monitoring of actively generated impulses ininfant and adult (Trevarthen, 1986a; Trevarthen et al.,1999). In early protoconversations, when the infant is 6weeks old, alternation or turn taking on a slow adagio(1 beat in 900 milliseconds or 70}minute) is set up. Withina month or two, in animated games, the beat of sharedvocal play with an infant accelerates to andante(1}700 milliseconds; 90}minute) or moderato (1}500milliseconds; 120}minute). Different qualities of engage-ment are determined by shared emotions organisedmutually in the communications. Homologous feelingsand changes in affect of infant and caretaker generateharmony, sympathy, support, comfort, restraint, orantagonism.

In the first 6 months, the emotions become strungtogether in increasingly impassioned plots , in whichprotagonists play expressive parts to each other. Sterndescribes feeling qualities transmitted with distinctiveactivation contours, which are captured by such kineticterms as crescendo, decrescendo, fading, explod-ing, bursting, elongated, fleeting, pulsing, wavering, effortful, easy, and so on (Stern, 1993,p. 206). In Sterns terms, these give vitality forms tothe emotions (vitality affects), which would seem to behomologous with the sentic forms described in musicalexpression of feelings by Manfred Clynes (Clynes, 1980,1983; Clynes & Nettheim, 1982). The intuitive parentingbehaviour of a father or mother at play with an infantshows that the adult is sensitive to the infants emotionand unconsciously skilled in giving the right level ofemotionally coloured contingent responses (H. Papousek

& Bornstein, 1992; H. Papousek & Papousek, 1987; M.Papousek, 1996; Stern, 1971, 1974, 1992, 1999).

Laboratory tests have proved that, by the middle of thefirst year, infants hear musical parameters amazingly well(Demany, 1982; Trehub, 1987; Trehub et al., 1993, 1997;Zentner & Kagan, 1996), and they show preferences forthese same parameters in the vocal productions ofmothers (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980; Trehub, 1990; Fass-bender, 1996; M. Papousek, 1994, 1996). It seems that theinfants acute ability to hear musical elements in amothers voice is important for state regulation by themothers sympathetic response to the infants expressionsof arousal, fretfulness, tiredness, playfulness, joy, etc. (M.Papousek & Papousek, 1981). But the infant is not justresponding to the mothers signals with a reflex statechange, and the adult is responding to the rhythms andemotional quality of the infants expressions in a joint,two-way performance. They are musicking per-formance and listening together (Small, 1998). Themother is attuning to musicality in the infants ex-pressions and communicating with the infant (M. Pap-ousek, 1994, 1996; H. Papousek & Papousek, 1987; M.Papousek & Papousek, 1981, 1989; Stern, 1993, 1999;Stern et al., 1985).

Sustained orienting of the babys head towards aloudspeaker that is presenting preferred sounds has beenused to show that infants 4 to 8 months old candiscriminate melodic patterns independent of pitch, andmelodic contours with variation of intervals (Chang &Trehub, 1977a; Trehub, Bull, & Thorpe, 1984; Trehub,Thorpe, & Morrongiello, 1985, 1987; for a synthesis, seeTrehub et al., 1995). Trehub (1990) concludes that infants representation of melodies is abstract and adult-like (p. 437). It has been shown that infants candistinguish pairs of notes separated by one semi-tone, andthey can recall a melody based on the tones of the majortriad better than one that is atonal. Other tests dem-onstrate that infants are sensitive to tempo and torhythmic sequences independent of tempo (Trehub &Thorpe, 1989), and that they experience Gestalt group-ing effects like adults (Chang & Trehub, 1977b;Demany, 1982; Demany, McKenzie, & Vurpillot, 1977;Fassbender, 1993; Me! len, 1999a, b; Thorpe & Trehub,1989; Thorpe, Trehub, Morrongiello, & Bull, 1988).They respond to fundamental pitch independent of tonalcomposition (Clarkson & Clifton, 1985), perceiving andcategorising differences in timbre of nonspeech tones(Clarkson & Clifton, 1985; Clarkson, Clifton, & Perris,1988; Trehub, Endman, & Thorpe, 1990). They aresensitive to differences in timbre between vowels [a] and[i], in spite of variations in fundamental frequency,duration, and intensity (Kuhl, 1985).

Trehub argues from her data and observations onhuman voices that the design features of infant musicshould embody pitch levels in the vicinity of the octavebeginning with middle C (262 Hz), simple contours thatare unidirectional or that have few changes in pitchdirection (e.g., rise-fall), slow tempos (approximately 25notes}sec), and simple rhythms (Trehub, 1990, p. 443).These predictions match well the vocal patterns infantsproduce in song-like play, the prosodic patterns parentsuse to excite or calm their infants, and the songs thatadults sing to infants (Fernald, 1992a; H. Papousek,1996; M. Papousek, 1996; M. Papousek & Papousek,1981; Stern, 1999; Stern et al., 1977, 1983, 1985; Trainor,1996; Trehub, Schellenberg, & Hill, 1997; Trehub, Unyk,et al., 1997).


Self-awareness and Self-other Awareness : Showingoff, Stranger Fear, and Privileged Relationships forEmotional Attachment, and for Companionship inExperience

Two-month-old infants may show coyness when en-countering their own reflection in a mirror (Reddy, 2000).Older infants play with the fun and deceit of interactionsin teasing games (Nakano, 1994; Nakano & Kanaya,1993; Reddy, 1991; Reddy et al., 1997). When they playwith reactive mobiles, this seems not simply a response tocontingency of physical motion, as Watson (1972, 1984;Bahrick & Watson, 1985; Gergeley & Watson, 1999) hasproposed, nor just another kind of exploration of theembodied, proprioceptive self (Rochat, 1998). Rather it isan imaginative variant of the capacity for intersubjectivenegotiation, as H. Papousek (1967) demonstrated whenhe showed that 4-month-olds made communicativelyappropriate emotional reactions to success or failure inpredicting the behaviour of a reactive physical system,showing their motivation in a human way. Play is morelively and more satisfying for the infant with a partnerwho is not merely moving with mechanical contingency,but also varying the contingency and qualifying themoves of self and other with mock expressions of surprise,anxiety, joy, etc. The emotions communicated are es-sential to thefull game between two humans. An infantplaying with a reactive mobile is as if with anotherpersonhe or she being other-aware, as much as a kittenbatting after a paper ball is chasing prey (Hall, 1998).

Sterns dynamic affects describe transforming statesthat continuously and rhythmically synchronise andregulate the flow of play (Stern, 1993). They givecommunicative meaning to the discrete action patternsshown in photographs of the climax facial expressions(Ekman, 1993) representing the categorical affects ofanger, joy, sadness, disgust, fear, and surprise. Suchvisible and static forms of emotion punctuate a dynamicmusic-like expression of interpersonal feelings in thevoice, and the dance in body movement and handgestures. Even in newborns, expressions of emotion incommunication are blends, and the succession of chang-ing expressions is a central component of the message(Oster, 1978; Oster & Ekman, 1978). Analysis of DTVrecordings, and the effects of replay, clarify this point(Murray & Trevarthen, 1985; Trevarthen, 1993a, b;Nadel, Carchon, et al., 1999).

Alternations of address and reply, of asserting andapprehending or attending (Trevarthen et al., 1999),between the infant and an adult in a conversation game,are animated by continuously changing and contingentlyexchanged expressions of mixed relational emotionssmiles and laughter signalling joy in sharing, bold andmock-angry threats as self-assertion, looks away andfrowns of impatience reacting to intrusions, fear to signalthe impact of strange and startling events, pouts and criesof anger with fatigue or when self-actions are frustrated,tears of sadness conveying loneliness or pain, and so on.None of these constellations of emotion are easilydescribed by combining the classical discrete categories ofemotion. They are coherent, so-called non-basic emotionswith immediate interpersonal value, as discussed below.

Mutual attunement of dynamic feelings and imitationof actions and expressions regulates sharing, or rejection,of purposes. The infant can imitate, reply to, or ignore apartner, or show decisive avoidance. The adults playoften seems designed to challenge the assertive inde-

pendence of an infant. Parental teasing games, charac-teristic of good relationships, demonstrate this nego-tiation. Infants, also, tease their companions, especiallyafter 3 months, and this behaviour, with early demon-strations of coyness (Reddy, 2000), proves that infantsalready have an expectation of and interest in what theother may perceive and do, an other-awareness (Draghi-Lorenz, Reddy, & Morris, 2000; Reddy, 1991, 2000;Reddy et al., 1997).

Infants may react to others attention with self-testinggestures and display, creating socially conscious manner-isms or bearing, which Wallon (1928) called, in French,prestance : i.e., offering the self to others by assuming aceremonial posture or manner, acknowledging a publicand their formal or intuitive appreciation. Six-month-olds often show off, making exaggerated postures orgrimaces, displaying imitated trick behaviours, suchas head shaking, bouncing, hand-clapping, silly faces,shouting, theatrically coughing or squealing, and theyrepeat appreciated behaviours to amuse themselves orfamiliar companions (Reddy, 1991; Trevarthen, 1990a,1998a). Infants also turn these display behaviours to facea mirror, examining themselves with amusement anddisplaying lively postures and hand gestures, whichindicates that this kind of self-consciousness is part of theawareness of others (Fiamenghi, 1997; Reddy, 2000;Reddy et al., 1997; Trevarthen, 1986b, 1990a; Tre-varthen et al., 1999). Siblings, and adults, take up thedeveloping sense of fun to make the infant laugh withmock attacks and exaggerated comments, and thisevidently can assist development of the infants socialunderstanding and social expression (Dunn, 1994; Nadel& Tremblay-Leveau, 1999). Expressions of these subtlekinds gain value in the more intricate negotiations oftriads, such as mother-father-infant interactions (Fivaz-Depeursinge & Corboz-Warnery, 1999) or those betweenan adult and two infants (Nadel & Tremblay-Leveau,1999).

Infants also develop, at about 7 or 8 months, bothstronger attachment to the mother and increasedstranger fear (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970; Sroufe, 1977,1996). These developments, viewed in the whole contextof infants social behaviours at this age, appear to beelaborations of motives that prepare for cooperativelearning in specific relationships, i.e. of conventionalbehaviours and symbols that are meaningful with knowncompanions (Trevarthen & Logotheti, 1987). First mean-ings make sense only in the restricted culture of thefamily, and an infants learned tricks and mannerisms arelikely to be misunderstood by unfamiliar persons, whomay, quite sensibly, be regarded with suspicion. In thelast months of the first year imitated behaviours arereadily incorporated in delayed reproductions (Meltzoff,1995; Meltzoff & Moore, 1999; Trevarthen, 1990a),which proves their role in the development of arbitrarysymbolic representations (Akhtar & Tomasello, 1996;Nadel & Butterworth, 1999; Piaget, 1962). Games with 6-month-olds increasingly involve objects (Hubley & Tre-varthen, 1979; Pecheux et al., in press ; Trevarthen &Hubley, 1978), and infants take more opportunities forjoining their exploration of the private knowledge ofthings with the social experience of being an actor.

Imbalance in the complex of motives emerging at thistime in a disordered brain mechanism of intentions andintersubjectivity may be the principle factor precipitatingdiagnostic features of autistic behaviour, which wediscuss further below (Hobson, 1993a; S. J. Rogers,


Figure 2. Intrinsic motives coordinate three types of engagement of a human subject with the body and the outside world:AProcesses that regulate the physiological functions of the body maintain the subjects organismic integrity and sustain vitalfunctions; BEngagements with physical objects and situations assume anticipatory control over the effects of actions, aided byperception of the properties of the objects and surroundings and what they afford for different purposes ; CCommunication withother subjects, and any adjustment to their behaviour, must take account of their purposes and awareness. This communication andanticipation of other subjects behaviour is aided by perception of their motives and emotions, which are detected by perception ofmovements and autonomic adjustments that prepare for critical intentions to be carried out. Combinations of these three kinds ofmotive generate three domains of subjective and intersubjective life : IIndividual subjects can act on the physical world to benefittheir existence as organisms, evaluating objects and situations in terms of their usefulness for nutrition, self-protection, comfort, etc. ;IIAid from other subjects may be enlisted to benefit individuals state of wellbeing or comfort. The kind of relationship describedas Attachment between a child and caregiver is of this kind; IIIWhen subjects act collaboratively with joint and mutually awareinterest in their common world of objects and places where they may act and plan actions together, they gain intersubjective

understanding of common meanings. This is the companionship that leads to cultural learning of all kinds.

1999; S. J. Rogers & Pennington, 1991; Trevarthen,Aitken, Papoudi, & Robarts, 1998). Autism usuallybecomes evident in, or before, the second year ; it cannottake on the appearance of a disorder in a verbalisabletheory of mind (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985) untilmany months later. Nor is the investigative 1-year-oldonly concerned with mastering object concepts. Throughsharing protoconversation and play with other personsmotives, understandings, and purposes, learning becomesa part of intentional self-regulation with relation to thingsand events, and self-other regulationwith persons (Aitken& Trevarthen, 1997; S. J. Rogers, 1999).

We distinguish three directions of a subjects mo-

tivation, or anticipation of regulation and experience: inones own body, to objects, and to other persons, andthere are three corresponding functions of emotion(Trevarthen, 1993a, 1998a, in press ; Trevarthen &Hubley, 1978). These, we propose, by their regulated andresponsive interactions, give the fundamental organis-ation to the changing consciousness and learning ofinfants, as diagrammed in Fig. 2. At times the mind of theinfant and young child is more taken up with intrinsicproblems of self-regulation and self-organisation orautopoesis . Other periods of experience are cognitivelydirected to investigate physical objects, to performoperations on them, and to learn their substantive


properties and processes. Then again, the infant may beseeking to share experiences, purposes, and the explo-ration of meaning in conscious companionship with otherpersons. There is evidence that motive transitions andPRCs that lead to advances in motives and behavioursmay be coupled to difficult or regressive periods atparticular ages when the infant becomes more demandingof the main caregivers attention and has difficulty withequilibrating emotional states, and with internal auto-nomic states and sleeping (Brazelton, 1993; Trevarthenet al., 2000; Van de Rijt-Plooij & Plooij, 1993) (seeFig. 1).

Socioemotional Learning, Shared NarrativeAwareness, and First Comprehension of Words

At the same time as it provides for joyful sharing offeelings and for teasing games, intuitive parenting (H.Papousek & Papousek, 1987) is clearly adapted to guidethe child towards customary ways of appraising theworld, proper use of objects, and communicating insocially approved ways. By 6 months infants are capableof reproducing routines learned in musical}rhythmic playor other structured games as gestures of communicationby deferred imitation (Nadel & Butterworth, 1999;Trevarthen, 1990a, 1998a, p. 40). These behaviours arenot simply imitations of the forms of procedures ormannerismsthey are significant, emotionally chargedinterpersonal messages or displays, as, indeed, all infantsimitations tend to be in some measure from the earliestdays (Kokkinaki, 1998; Trevarthen et al., 1999).

In the intimate relation with a parent or other familiarcompanion the infant can take the role of instructor orinformer to the adults communications. This is very clearin the developments of parental expressive behavioursand speech in musical and other games around the middleof the first year, and also in the further transformations ofthe adults speech acts when the infant becomes adept atfollowing and cooperatingwith pointing and instructions,led by the adults changing tone of interest and sat-isfaction. Before 40 weeks, when the critical developmentin infant cooperativeness normally occurs, mothers tendto ask many questions and to use many provocative orinviting forms of utterance to attract the childs attentionand to give pleasure, such as rhetorical questions, playcomments, exclamations, and mock emotional outbursts.After the infant becomes attentive and compliant to themothers utterances and gestures of purpose and interest,many more directives are used (Trevarthen & Marwick,1986) and the adult talks in a more matter-of-fact tone. Ina sense, the infant gives an external curriculum of motivechanges for the parents intuitions to follow, and thiscurriculum changes intrinsically as the infant develops. Itis not simply a reflection of what the infant has beentaught.

A toddler picks up language sociallyby doing thingswith it and by noticing what other persons do with it,sharing interests, actions, fantasy, and mimesis (Bates,Camioni, & Volterra, 1975; Ninio & Snow, 1988, 1996).But it does not help, especially with the infants under 9months of age, to think only aboutwhat is called languagepragmatics the factors that govern choice of lang-uage in social contexts. The origin of the word from Greekpragmatikos implies an expertise taking practical accountof real, factual situations, and accepted principles ofconduct. When children are negotiating ongoing activity,

participating in social routines and well-practised for-mats, or regulating mutual attention, they carry out theseintentions with intersubjectively regulated feelingbeingserious, acting silly, expressing enjoyment or exuberance,teasing. Acts by means of which toddlers negotiatemotives of social participation are found to come earlierin development than intention-directing protoimper-atives (Ninio & Snow, 1996; Snow, Pan, Imbens-Bailey,& Herman, 1996), just as person-person games comebefore person-person-object games in the middle of thefirst year (Trevarthen & Hubley, 1978). Meltzoff (1985b,1995) has noted the importance of deferred imitation inthe developing understanding of others intentions in thesecond year of infancy. Reproduction of the act checksthe original purpose.

Languagepragmatics carries implicationsofrationalobjectivity that are especially unfortunate in applicationto the early protolanguage communications of infants.In the social life of a 1-year-old, communication withother persons is primarily concerned with how the rela-tionship offers opportunities for taking part in intentionsand attentions with the emotions that accompany them(Papaeliou, 1998). What is important in a protolanguagesign or act of meaning is not the fact referred to, oreven just the social convention of its form, but thesympathy and aspects of intersubjectivity exhibited in thelooking, gesturing, and vocalising (Halliday, 1975). In-fants can use others as conditions or context for theimplementation of their will, but their behaviours haveintrinsic interpersonal valueas irony, humour, or teas-ing, for example. Infant semiosis is emotional, not justrepresentational or referential (Trevarthen, 1994). It isfundamentally self-with-other-referred, and from thatas foundation it can become self-object-referred orgain a practical objective. It is metacommunicative, inGregory Batesons sense (1956), before it is meta-cognitive.

Even among adults, much of language is not so muchfor practical use, the applying of purposes to reality. Noris it just governed by rules. It is social in the sense that itis interpersonal, emotive, relational, intersubjectiveconcerned not with the truth of a context and itsconstraints or usable affordances, nor so much withmaxims of speaking, but with impulses and emotions inimmediate human contact while imaginations are activelyrunning ahead of purposes (Rommetveit, 1979, 1998).Much confusion has been generated by attempting toexplain the early stages of language learning as a matterof coordinating vocalisations just with referential in-tentions and attentionsrequests, pointing, showing,givingwithout concern for the human feelings andsensitivities which form the dynamic texture of all livecommunication and experiencing together . Joint at-tention, which is strongly associated with the picking upof words in the second and third years (Locke, 1993;Rollins & Snow, 1998; Tomasello, 1988; Tomasello &Farrar, 1986), is not just a convergence of lines of sightand directions of instrumental action. It depends on themotives for doing while child and partner are attentive toone another in communication.

Nadel (Nadel, Gue! rini, Peze! , & Rivet, 1999; Nadel &Peze! , 1993; Nadel & Tremblay-Leveau, 1999) has demon-strated the importance of immediate imitation amongtoddlers, including imitation of utterances, for the sharingof meaning, and she underlines the pleasure and humourof the sharing. Emotional narrative, the dramatics ofexpressive intentions, may even provide the underlying


energy of the relatively inanimate, decontextualised, ordisembedded (Donaldson, 1978), language of informativetext or prepositional logic. Human stories (includingscientific theories, which are just explanatory storieswherein emotive aspects have been disciplined!) seekjoint imaginative, and emotive, experiences that evolvetheir purposes far beyond the present context and exploreideas and feelings for both the past and the future,making fiction out of artificial recollections (Akhtar &Tomasello, 1998; Bruner, 1986; Donald, 1991; Ricouer,1981, 1984). Children and adults alike are easily caught inthe drama of make-believe (P. L. Harris, 1998), and eveninfants seem to be playing with narratives of emotionlong before they can talk (Malloch, 1999; Trevarthen,1987, 1998a, 1999a). Both the emotional process and theform of the action are certainly important in toddlerssense of play, and both are shared.

Emotional intonation in speech to infants prepares apath to the meaning of words. Kitamura and Burnham(1998b) used the preferential looking paradigm to showthat 6-month-olds prefer high affect speech of afemale actor with good voice control who had been ananny and was therefore practised in IDS. She recordedsimple utterances with high and low affect, and high andlow pitch. The infants oriented to the affective content,and in certain instances, low-pitched utterances werepreferred. The authors concluded that the affectionatetone is, the pivotal quality that attract

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2001 - Infant Intersubjectivity. Research, Theory, And Clinical Applications