Characteristics of non-verbal adult-infant communication in encyclopedic discourse

The article describes communication of infants as a pre-speech period of child language acquisition. The research attempts to substantiate its role in the development of cognitive abilities, social and communicative skills. The proposed review is based on an analysis of the French Encyclopedia for Parents, whose authors describe the influence of nonverbal means (prosody, gestures and facial expressions, eye contact, tactility) on the infant’s ability to recognize speech. The text investigation results showed that during the first year of life a child observes the non-verbal behavior of others, gets introduced to the surrounding community and engage with it via tactile sensations, develops visual and motor skills, learns to respond and express his emotions using non-verbal means, obtains information from all channels available to him. The research results allow obtaining the most complete description of the infant's communicative skills based on available nonverbal resources.