... attention with a social partner, which often speeds up language development (Berk, 2000). For the purpose of brevity the current piece will focus on the roles of gestures and early vocalisations to illustrate how babies learn to communicate before they can talk. Research into pre-verbal communication centres around the question of how infants learn to monitor the behaviour of others through the voice, facial expressions and gestures, leading to the ability to read the intentions of others. Some of the challenges of this type of social referencing require that infants note changes in expression, as well as the nature and intensity of the expression, how this reflects internal mental states, and where the attention of another is directed (Keenan, 2002). This period of pre-verbal communication is mainly measured by assessing how much a baby or young child pays attention to the voices and faces of those people around them, most often ...

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