ABSTRACT
The infant's innate capacity to develop language is already the fruit of a relationship. Mother and baby begin interacting during pregnancy through a variety of mediators: hormones, breathing, and heart rhythms, maternal expectations, thoughts, and postural attitudes. Before 1970, there was little curiosity about young infants' interactions with their parents. Psychoanalysts had a theoretical interest in the development of the infant's ego. The problem of how linguistic communication began led to observation of how mothers and fathers communicated with infants before speech. What infants do at a few days old in face-to-face interactions with their mothers demonstrates that the baby is born ready to interact with another human being. They show signs of intentions to speak and appear to have well-organized, sometimes even witty or humorous, exchanges with mothers. Adults behave in widely different ways with infants, some being shy and fearful, and fathers differ in important ways from mothers.
