CoboLewis, "The temporal coordination of early infant communication

The ability to coordinate expressive behaviors is crucial to the development of social and emotional communication. Coordination involves systematic sequencing of behaviors from two different modalities that have some temporal overlap. A bootstrapping procedure was used to determine whether preverbal 3- and 6-month-old infants sequence vocalizations, gazes at their mothers ’ faces, and facial expressions into pairs of coordinated patterns nonrandomly. Smiles and frowns were highly coordinated with vocalizations. Smiles were also coordinated with gazes at mothers ’ faces, which became stronger with age. Vocalizations were not coordinated with gazes at mothers ’ faces. These findings illustrate the manner in which infants temporally coordinate communicative actions and provide new evidence that facial expressions (particularly smiles) are central to early infant communications. Infants use vocalizations, facial expressions, and gaze direction to interact with others. One characteristic of human infants ’ rapid expansion of interactive abilities in the first 6 months of life may be a developing ability to combine actions from different behav-ioral modalities into specific patterns that involve some temporal overlap. For example, a vocalization might begin and end within a smile, or a gaze at the mother’s face might contain a smile that continues after the baby has gazed elsewhere. Such coordinated patterns may have specific communicative meanings that change with age, but relevant research is scarce. In this article, we examine whether young infants coordinate actions between different behav-ioral modalities into specific patterns nonrandomly in order to shed light on their interactive and expressive competence before the onset of speech. Few studies have examined how infants ’ communicative behav-iors in one modality are associated with behaviors in another modality. Previous studies have focused on the association of infant gaze with other expressive behaviors. In the first 6 months of life, young infants spend more time smiling (Kaye & Fogel