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Creativity in communication between a baby and his father

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Edited by Patrick Andrews, Monday, 14 Oct 2019, 19:57

This tweet received wide attention recently and it seemed to relate to issues on some of the courses I teach:

https://twitter.com/_11Remember_/status/1136087637914247170

Some key points that seem to emerge are:

- the interactional function is key here.  It is not clear what the baby is expressing and if he understands what his father is saying (it is doubtful that he understands much of the informational content) but there seems to be a strong communication of fellow feeling, companionship here

- the communication is multimodal as the two of them use gestures to accomapany what they say

- they often mirror the gestures

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