Interactions, Interpersonal

Prebirth–Infancy

Mothers are the first to feel the movement of their baby in the womb. Fathers, family members, and others are often invited (and not invited as well) to caress the mother’s protruding midsection to feel or listen to the movement of the growing child. These initial movements and the corresponding rubs, pats, caresses, and talks to the belly of the mother begin the process of interpersonal interaction. Emotions are high, as the parents, family members, and friends begin to construct a relationship and an attachment with the child to be. Touch and vocal stimuli have been found to be processed in utero. An infant is born with the capacity to focus vision about eight inches away and with considerable cognitive and perceptual capabilities that lay the foundation for communicative development. At 2 months of age, infants can produce a wide variety of sounds, are soothed more by human voices than other sounds, and respond uniquely to their mother’s voice. Infants respond to and revocalize their caregiver’s utterances within months of being born. The development of preverbal routines helps to create a strong foundation for interpersonal interactions, and, at 9 months, infants often initiate preverbal routines.

Childhood

Research into human interaction within the first years of childhood has been dominated by the mother–child relationship. What matters most to a child’s ability to successfully develop and competently interact with others is the presence of a consistent, supportive, and responsive caregiver, whether mother, father, uncle, aunt, or grandparent. Adult–child interaction during early childhood is often referred to as baby talk or motherese. The interaction is marked by simplified syntax, short length of utterance, nonsense syllables, raised pitch, increased loudness, altered speech, and longer vowel duration. Toward the end of the child’s first year of life, more systematic use of communicative gestures and first words appear within interaction. The caregiver’s ability to follow, reinforce, and engage the infant’s attempts at communication is related to enhanced vocabulary development. Verbal and nonverbal exchanges between parents and their children during childhood are crucial to the development of appropriate and competent interpersonal interactions across multiple domains in the coming years.

During childhood, several important milestones in language acquisition occur that are directly related to appropriate social–cognitive development. Word comprehension begins to appear at the end of the first year of life, and word production including expressive language occurs during the second year of life. Parent–child interaction resulting from language development is strongly associated with an emerging sense of self and the social, emotional, and cognitive growth of the child.

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