Me and you, me with you: Observation of vocal interactions among very young partners

How many ways have very young children to communicate? And what is the role of the voice in early interactions? Beginning with previous research on the vocal development of children, the following paper describes an observation project that tries to answer those two questions, by the analysis of the vocal gestures of very young children attending two nurseries in Bologna, Italy. A large number of research studies show the presence of musical elements inside the child/mother interactions, especially at home. On the other side recent studies point out the presence of a shared “language” among children, characterised by babbling, vocalisation, and lallation of different intonation and length. Thus it is interesting to understand the role of the voice in groups of five infants interacting peer-to-peer in a naturalistic setting in a nursery school. The general aim of this protocol is to observe and describe the use and the musical elements (like intensity and pitch) of the voice during the interactions among peers of 14 months old, without the presence of adult. Our results underline the richness and the variety of the vocal gestures of very young children when they are free to move in the room and to interact with each other. The data point out that the naturalistic setting, as the nursery school, allows for the observation of “micro” relations inside the groups.