Are higher-level cognitive processes the only way that purposefulness can be introduced into the human interaction? In this paper, we provide a microanalysis of early mother-child interactions and argue that the beginnings of joint intentionality can be traced to the practice of embedding the child's actions into culturally shaped episodes. As action becomes coaction, an infant's perception becomes tuned to interaction affordances.

We conducted a naturalistic study in which German mothers interacted with their three-month-old infants during diaper changing as an everyday activity. Following the idea that “acoustic packaging” educates infants' attention, we explored whether the verbal input to the infants in natural interactions simultaneously contains action information. Applying a microanalysis method, we first analyzed the data qualitatively by identifying classes of body movement and vocal activities (that we called vocal types). We used these categories to observe the multimodal interaction practices of mothers and to describe the interaction ecology of everyday activity. Second, we analyzed the co-occurrence of language (in the form of different vocal activities) and action (in the form of body movements) quantitatively. We found that during early interaction with infants, German mothers vocalize in a tight temporal relationship with action over a considerable part of the overall interaction time, thereby making the vocal signal both perceivable and tangible to the infants.

In the embodied, situated, enacted and distributed approaches to cognition, the coordinative role of language comes to the fore. Language, with its symbolic properties, arises from a multimodal stream of interactive events and gradually gains power to constrain them in a functional and adaptive way. In this article, we attempt to integrate three approaches to information in cognitive systems to provide a theoretical background to the process of development of language as such a coordinator. Ecological psychology provides an explanation for how any behaviors or events become informative through the process of “tuning” to affordances that control individual and collective behavior. The dynamical approach helps to operationalize this control as a functional reduction of degrees of freedom of individual and collective systems. Cognitive semiotics provides a typology of constraints showing their interrelations: it proposes conditions under which informational controls that function as indices and icons may become symbolic, providing a qualitatively different form of constraint, which can be partially ungrounded from the ongoing stream of multimodal events. The article illustrates the proposed processes with examples from actual parent-infant interaction and points to ways of verifying them in a more quantitative way.

Dynamical systems approaches to social coordination underscore how participants’ local actions give rise to and maintain global interactive patterns and how, in turn, they are also shaped by them. Developmental research can deliver important insights into both processes: (1) the stabilization of ways of interacting, and (2) the gradual shaping of the agentivity of the individuals. In this article we propose that infants’ agentivity develops out of participation, i.e. acting a part in an interaction system. To investigate this development this article focuses on the ways in which participation in routinized episodes may shape infant’s agentivity in social events. In contrast to existing research addressing more advanced forms of participating in social routines, our goal was to assess infants’ early participation as evidence of infants grasping of their behavior as agentive. In our study, 19 Polish mother–infant dyads were filmed playing peekaboo when the infants were 4 and 6 months of age. We operationalized infants’ participation in the peekaboo in terms of their use of various behaviors across modalities during specific phases of the game: We included smiles, vocalizations, and attempts to cover and uncover themselves or their mothers. We hypothesized that infants and mothers would participate actively in the routine by regulating their behavior so as to adhere to the routine format. Furthermore, we hypothesized that infants who experienced more scaffolding would be able to adopt a more active role in the routine. We operationalized scaffolding by analyzing mothers’ use of specific peekaboo structures that allowed infants to anticipate when it was their turn to act. Results suggested that infants as young as 4 months of age engaged in peekaboo and took up turns in the game, and that their participation increased at 6 months of age. Crucially, our results suggest that infants’ behavior was organized by the global structure of the peekaboo game, because smiles, vocalizations, and attempts to uncover occurred significantly more often during specific phases rather than being evenly distributed across the whole interaction. Furthermore, the way mothers structured the game at 4 months predicted infant participation at both 4 and 6 months of age.

In this article, we note that despite being a multimodal phenomenon, turn-taking has still been investigated mostly as being unimodal. Based on theoretical positions emphasizing that communication is organized jointly by interaction partners, we identify the challenge of assessing human sequential behavior that is (a) spread across different modalities and (b) co-constructed with a partner. By analyzing a corpus of mother-child dyads with Cross Recurrence Quantification Analysis and Frequent Pattern Mining, we offer novel steps toward understanding multimodal turn-taking.