ABSTRACT
It is not until babies start crying in order to attract the attention of their mothers that their gestures become significant. In other words, for a gesture to be significant, it must convey to the attender the meaning that the agent intends. A significant gesture stands for a certain idea in the agent's mind, and the agent can predict the kind of response such a gesture will evoke in the attender. In Mead's words, a gesture, which could be a sound, a look, a movement, and so on, becomes significant when it has the same meaning for both participants, for the one who is making it and for the one who is responding to it. That it is a significant gesture indicates that there is a common
As Condon and Sander point out, the child is entrained into a culture by sharing from the very beginning the rhythm of speech and communication. The child learns the meanings of messages just as much from rhythms and intonation as from the actual meanings of words. In addition, as Kempton (1980) says, the acquisition of synchronization patterns in speech at an early stage of socialization integrates two aspects oflanguage acquisition: learning the language and learning how to interact with others. The process of entrainment is not language specific, and a child has equal receptivity to different languages and can start learning any language equally well (Chomsky, 1962). Children can originally produce all the sounds necessary for learning foreign languages, but it is when sounds become associated with exact meanings that children lose this ability Oakobson, 1941; Kempton, 1980).
