| Abstract: | According to some authors, socialisation explains the emergence and development of communicative behavior. Other authors think that this development is an autonomous process: either because communication and even sociability exist per se and are innate activities of the infant, or because the development of communication is an aspect of cognitive development. Up to the present time the experiments and observations do not lend support to one hypothesis over the other: there are strong arguments in both directions, without them being definitive. Two approaches seem suited to establish the range and restriction of these different theoretical points of view: a systematic analysis of the reciprocal roles of the adult and the infant during interaction and the study of the influence of certain characteristics of the family or institutional milieu on the communicative behavior of the infant. |
