Babies Learn Facial Expressions

• According to communications professors at Rollins College, as much as 90 percent of communication takes place in the form of "nonverbals" like body language and facial expressions. During the first year of life, all infants learn to associate common facial expressions with their associated meanings. As infants are exposed to a number of different individuals, they observe how each person acts (or reacts) while actively scanning their faces; using this process, infants learn to associate wide eyes and an open mouth with surprise, furrowed eyebrows and a frown with anger and a smile with happiness. Infants are also able to use the same social indicators to associate the act of pointing with referring to something in a certain direction as well as a number of other nonverbal communication actions. The ability of infants to learn nonverbal communication through social interaction is so important that, according to infant reference site Baby Bumble Bee, actively teaching young children American Sign Language can actually raise the child's IQ score.
  
  

Infants Copy Actions

• During the first one to three years of life, infants spend a considerable amount of time observing and copying the actions of adults and other children around them. Through copying actions, infants learn critical motor skills like grasping objects, crawling, walking and even holding a spoon. While all babies randomly and spontaneously engage in physical activity, babies who have social context cues to copy can more quickly and easily coordinate their actions into a deliberate, useful movement. Parents who actively work with their children, or who expose their infants to other children learning the same skills, may note an accelerated learning curve as their infants pick up critical motor skills more quickly. In addition, a study conducted by researchers at Manhattanville College and Rutgers University found that infants are far more likely to mimic actions performed by someone they know than by someone they have never met before, further emphasizing the importance of social context on infant development.
  
  

Speech and Communication Development

• As infants develop the need to communicate, they often gain the ability to do so through social interactions. Children can learn to speak on their own, but cannot convey useful, real-world information without proper social context cues that allow them to learn the local language. An infant in America who points to a glass of water and refers to it as a "fur," for example, is unlikely to be rewarded with a drink; infants who note through social context that other adults and infants refer to the beverage as "water" are far more likely to be given a drink when they ask for it. This language learning through social context is also the basis for regional dialects and accents, as young children copy not only individual words, but the way words are strung together and pronounced.