ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the infant circle to describe the dramatic developmental transformations that occur in expressive and receptive competence during the biobehavioral shift that occurs at about 2 months of age. It examines briefly the adult circle to describe more fully how caregivers tailor their communicative acts to suit emerging infant communicative skills. The chapter describes a series of microanalytic studies that document how young infants and adults act together to structure interpersonal coordinations and share emotional messages. It discusses how researchers have devised systematic ways to describe the organization of episodes of engagement, and how they have crafted data analytic and experimental procedures to test competing explanations of how infants and adults achieve such coordination. The ingredients that transform infants’ communicative presence in caregiver–infant interactions are spread throughout their behavioral repertoire. The chapter considers four that are especially pivotal: the arousal state of active alertness, gaze modulation, the social smile, and the coo.
