Blackwell Reference Online

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It is fascinating to observe how a child grows. Seemingly helpless, a newborn infant soon starts interacting with parents and others, and about one year later starts to utter words. A number of researchers have attempted to understand the mechanisms by which this development occurs. The most heated discussions have concerned whether a newborn is capable of mimicry . Meltzoff and Moore (1977) and Meltzoff (1985) argued that a just-born infant is able to mimic an adult's facial expressions, including protruding the tongue, opening the mouth, and pursing the lips. These innate competencies are a driving force in infant development. Yet, to nurture these innate competencies, those surrounding the infant must influence her. On the basis of outstanding experiments, Sander and colleagues consider the infant and caregiver to comprise a single system and contend that it is necessary to analyze the relationship as a unit (e.g. Sander 1977 ). Similarly, Kaye and colleagues analyzed the mother–child interaction as a process in which a social system forms and discerned developmental transitions (e.g. Kaye 1982 ). The social system here has two prerequisites: (1) members must be able to anticipate the behavior of one another based on their experiences and (2) the members of the system need to share common aims. Kaye (1982) claimed that the child gradually begins to share the same aims ... log in or subscribe to read full text