Before children say their first words, they begin to communicate through eye contact, facial expressions, gestures, cries and sounds. Researchers have provided evidence that even before infants can speak, caregivers and infants show turn-taking patterns. This vocal interaction in early infancy has been referred to as protoconversations.[1, 2]

In protoconversations, the adult may say something and the infant responds by making eye contact, cooing, smiling, showing lip and tongue movements, or waving arms, which then invites a response from the adult. These caregiver-child interactions help build infants’ abilities for further language acquisition. A study showed that maternal interaction with infants as young as two months occurred in various modalities, including gaze and vocalisation.[3]

These “conversation-like” interactions go back and forth between the adult and the infant for several turns. Studies have shown that the timings of these sequences are like that of adult verbal conversations. A study on infants aged between eight and 21 weeks based on the analysis of 176 samples of naturalistic face-to-face interactions clearly showed that infants can initiate these conversations. Turn-taking in preverbal interaction adapts to infants’ changing motives for communicating and learning. Additionally, this also paves the road for learning the crucial socio-cognitive skills that precede and enable language use.[4]

Evidence shows that caregivers' speech to babbling infants provides crucial, real-time guidance to the development of their prelinguistic vocalisations.[5, 6] In an experiment with 60 nine and a half month-old infants, mothers of the infants were instructed to provide models of vocal production timed to be either contingent or noncontingent on their infants' babbling. Infants given contingent (immediate response to babbling) feedback rapidly restructured their babbling, incorporating phonological patterns from caregivers' speech. However, infants given noncontingent (non-immediate) feedback did not. Thus, preverbal infants learned new vocal forms by discovering phonological (sound structure) patterns in their mothers' contingent speech and then generalising from these patterns to create more sounds to communicate.[5]

Adults who observe and respond positively within appropriate timing to the infants’ protoconversations while playing encourage them to communicate willingly. Caregivers who talk and describe what they are doing with babies give linguistic inputs to them. This interaction helps build children’s self-regulation skills. 1. Bateson, M. C. (1975). Mother-infant exchanges: the epigenesis of conversational interaction. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 263, 101–113. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1975.tb41575.x

2. Trevarthen C., Aitken K. J. (2001). Infant intersubjectivity: research, theory, and clinical applications. J. Child Psychol. Psychiatry 42, 3–48. 10.1111/1469-7610.00701.

3. Yoo, H., Bowman,D and Kimbrough, O.D., (2018). The Origin of Protoconversation: An Examination of Caregiver Responses to Cry and Speech-Like Vocalizations. Frontiers in Psychology 9: 1510. (Level V) USA.

4. Gratier M., Devouche E., Guellai B., Infanti R., Yilmaz E., Parlato-Oliveira E. (2015). Early development of turn-taking in vocal interaction between mothers and infants. Front. Psychol. 6:1167. 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01167.

5. Goldstein, M. H., & Schwade, J.A. (2008) Social feedback to infants’ babbling facilitates rapid phonological learning. Psychol Sci 19:515–523.

6. Morgan, L., & Wren, Y. E. (2018). A Systematic Review of the Literature on Early Vocalizations and Babbling Patterns in Young Children. Communication Disorders Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525740118760215