From Infants' Reacting to Understanding: Grounding Mature Communication and Sociality Through Turn-Taking and Sequencing

I will investigate a number of pre-linguistic infants interacting with caregivers, and attempt to demonstrate that infants' natural reactions (laughing, crying, gazing) function as incipient interactional turn-taking devices employed to non-cognitively initiate communication with caregivers, fostering infant sociality. To demonstrate my claims, I analyze multiple fragments of infant/caregiver interaction to determine how infants come to participate in the interaction order through their natural reactions. The results demonstrate how interaction between infants and caregivers creates an interactional sequence possibly unique to infant/caregiver interaction¹, which grounds more mature interactional sequences. The results provide clues as to how infants become more communicative through being embedded in mature turn-taking, the foundation for social interaction order. The results will further indicate that it is indeed instances when infants' natural reactions are treated as some sort of turn, that ontogenetically ground more mature, conversation-analytic turn-taking, as well as future infant communication and cognition.