Conversations with a Two-Day-Old: A Response to Trevarthen (1974)

Do newborns engage in dialogues? This chapter explores evidence on social engagement in human neonates and uses case-based descriptive analysis of interactions with newborns. Starting from experimental data on neonates’ responses to communication disturbances, measured by the still-face procedure, it presents a case showing a neonate proactively engaging with the experimenter to resume a broken communication. It provides descriptive analyses of two cases of neonatal imitation and looks at how the babies not only proactively engaged the experimenter, but also, several, temporally coordinated, synchronized imitative cycles emerged between the baby and the experimenter. Given the richness and the complexity of the data that emerges from these cases, the chapter suggests that case-based descriptions should accompany experimental studies to understand data from experiments on neonatal communicative behaviour.