This paper offers a review of the literature on the role of imitation in the earliest stages of social interaction between babies and familiar partners. The review focuses on the ways in which reciprocal imitation marks familiar relationships that provide special contexts for babies to engage actively and exuberantly in the construction of a…

This study examined infants' abilities to separate speech from different talkers and to recognize a familiar word (the infant's own name) in the context of noise. In 4 experiments, infants heard repetitions of either their names or unfamiliar names in the presence of background babble. Five-month-old infants listened longer to their names when the…

The present research investigated whether 13.5-month-old infants would attribute to an actor a disposition to perform a recurring action, and would then use this information to predict which of two new objects--one that could be used to perform the action and one that could not--the actor would grasp next. During familiarization, the infants…