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How can parents communicate with their infants before the infants learn to talk? In this chapter, the author examines and discusses a process of enculturation by focusing on parental proxy talk, which parents use for their preverbal infants. Parental Proxy Talk is defined as parents' utterances from infants' perspectives, which involves a form of utterances said as if the infants themselves are saying them (Okamoto 2001, 2008; Okamoto et al. 2014a). In other words, Parental Proxy Talk is a form of talk in which parents, caregivers, and other adults produce utterances as if the talk happened in infants' voices. We analyzed two pairs of Japanese mothers and their infants 0, 3, and 6 months old, from our longitudinal project. The mothers' utterances from mother-infant interaction sessions were categorized according to addressivity of each utterance. The results showed that Japanese parents often use Parental Proxy Talk to communicate with their pre-verbal infants. We identified four types of Parental Proxy Talk: (1) from the child's view, (2) from the views of both the mother and child, (3) from an ambiguous view, and (4) from a transitional view. The parents attempted to get their infants to internalize their own cultural meanings through Parental Proxy Talk. Infants are not subjected to isolated utterances from parents, but rather exposed to dialogue between multiple voices embedded in context. Infants may appropriate the first voices as a tool to construct the self dialogically. At the same time, Parental Proxy Talk could be the parents' cultural representations and provide an opportunity to be modified for new generations. In this sense, parents and infants are interacting with each other on the generation borders, and they might inherit voices with cultural meanings and then maintain the culture and generate new culture.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-18765-5_19

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