TEMPORAL PATTERNING OF VOCAL BEHAVIOR IN MOTHER-INFANT ENGAGEMENTS - INFANT-INITIATED ENCOUNTERS AS UNITS OF ANALYSIS

It is a widely held view that mother-infant vocal engagements provide a foundation for children's development of communication and language abilities. In this paper we consider how the maternal covocalisation a nd alternating patterns of temporal dependence between the vocal behav iours of mothers and infants might facilitate such development. Two re lated issues are examined in relation to the choice of these patterns: first, the means by which temporal dependence is determined; second, the appropriateness of the selected units of analysis for the investig ation of the effect of mothers' behaviour on infant communication deve lopment. Regarding the first of these issues, we propose that dependen ce between the actions of mothers and infants can be determined by a p rocedure which randomly permutes the behavioural records of both mothe r and infant. In considering the second, we use pragmatic and ecologic al criteria to evaluate units of analysis for the investigation of tem poral patterning, and borrow the concepts of affordance and encounter from ecological perspectives on human perception to examine the role o f maternal behaviour in the emergence of communication and language ab ilities in infants.