ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
Mother-infant interaction, including baby talk, operates very differently from adult
communication. Mothers, as well as any adult interacting with a baby, pull faces at
babies, talk in higher pitch, even though they know the baby will not understand
the words, and verbalize baby-talk patterns to encourage an enjoyable emotional
response from baby and mother. An example Dissanayake uses is “Mommy loves
you. Yes. Yes. Did you know Mommy loves you? Yes she does. She does. She
loves you” (2001, 30). Such play-talk is structured like poetry or songs, with recognizable stanzas and motifs that repeat with slight variation along a particular
rhythm. The fossil evidence (described in Leaky 1994) suggests that mother-infant
interaction through proto-aesthetics developed at least 1.7 million years ago, practised by both Homo ergaster and Homo erectus (Dissanayake 2009). Because such
interaction solidifies and develops the first and most important relationship a child
has in the world, Dissanayake speculates that mother-infant proto-aesthetic interaction is an adaptation in its own right, one not often explored by evolutionary psychologists to probably its fullest importance. I agree.
The evidence from psychology about parent-child development is very strong,
consisting highly of proto-aesthetic sensibilities and details about the development
of babies minds and the necessity of proto-aesthetic interactions with babies in the
healthy development of babies (Trevarthen 1987), and rich in information about
how babies are born with brain pathways that are readied for detecting and encouraging baby-talk and interaction from adults in rhythmic and modal manners (Aitken and Trevarthen 1997) (Schore 1994) (for more, see Dissanayake 2000, chapter
1). Newborns can discern similarity between bright colours and loud sounds at the
age of three weeks (Lewkowicz and Turkewitz 1980); mothers and babies follow
regularities in improvised patterns of sounds, movements and facial play, adjusting
responses to each other within fractions of seconds in order to stimulate, maximize
enjoyment and freshness of their interaction (Beebe 1986), and strength of a mother’s vocalizations can frequently be matched with kicks from her baby corresponding to