ABSTRACT
In infancy, babies are apparently both interested in and responsive to the emotions and behavior of other people. They are born predisposed to attend to stimuli with the characteristics of the human face and voice, and they develop quickly “remarkable abilities to perceive the actions and expressions of other people” (Spelke & Cortelyou, 1981). They learn rapidly about stimuli that change in a manner that is contingent upon their own behavior – as does the behavior of other people interacting with them. By 2 months old, they respond differently to a person who intends to speak to them and one who speaks to someone else (Trevarthen, 1977). By the second half of their first year, they have begun to share a common communicative framework with other family members, and, as we have learned from the elegant experimental studies of social referencing (Klinnert, Campos, Sorce, Emde, & Svejda, 1983), in situations of uncertainty, they monitor the emotional expressions of their mothers and change their behavior appropriately in response to those expressions. As the work of those studying early language has shown particularly clearly, their comprehension of social procedures is surprisingly subtle. Bruner, for example, has persuasively argued that children have mastered the culturally appropriate use of requests, invitations, and reference well before they are correctly using the conventional linguistic forms (Bruner, 1983).
