Mothers provide differential feedback to infants’ prelinguistic sounds

nts spend the first year producing ic vocalizations that have the infra adult speech (Oller, 2000), few ssible social mechanisms of vocal d sponses of social partners can en particular vocalizations, but such i ment likely have not been focused ion is considered to be related to in rams not subject to environmen ; Kent, 1981; Lenneberg, 1967). ling traditionally has been presume e to produce adult-like sounds, ot been considered functionally imp (Kent, 1981; Oller, 2000). tly, the only proposed mechanis was imitation (Papousek & Papousek ents imitate various acoustic aspe ds during social interactions (Papo lso imitate different acoustic featu en et al., 1979; Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1 ld provide infants with contingent r sounds (Papousek, 1992), a revi Michael H. Goldstein Cornell University, USA