The Intersubjective Mirror in Infant Learning and Evolution of Speech

The Intersubjective Mirror in Infant Learning and Evolution of Speech illustrates how recent findings about primary intersubjectivity, participant perception and mirror neurons afford a new understanding of children’s nature, dialogue and language.
Based on recent infancy research and the mirror neurons discovery, studies of early speech perception, comparative primate studies and computer simulations of language evolution, this book offers replies to questions as: When and how may spoken language have emerged? How is it that infants so soon after birth become so efficient in their speech perception? What enables 11-month-olds to afford and reciprocate care? What are the steps from infant imitation and simulation of body movements to simulation of mind in conversation partners?
Stein Bråten is founder and chair of the Theory Forum network with some of the world’s leading infancy, primate and brain researchers who have contributed to his edited volumes for Cambridge University Press (1998) and John Benjamins Publishing Company (2007). (Series B)

Colwyn Trevarthen, University of Edinburgh:
Stein Bråten recounts a startling idea that has become an inspiring theory of how we know one another and speak. When studying simulations of language, it came to him that several people discussing a problem could only communicate if each could somehow 'be' the other, participating in their experience as a 'virtual other'. A lifetime later, with original photographs and drawings showing his children and grandchildren 'being other people', and after hours comparing very young chimpanzees' 'mother-centered learning' in a Norwegian zoo, he develops his theory, now given powerful support from the neuroscience of how intentions pass immediately between brains. He gives us a masterly review of a revolution in the philosophy of personhood, of discoveries in infant imitation, of research on language as culture, on the nature of sympathy, altruism and alienation, and of the detachment of self and other in autism. This book has important implications for education, therapy and other fields of practice and research.