The Dance of Emotions in Infant Semiolinguistic Development: Reflections on a Relational Research Methodology

Inspired by Colwyn Trevarthen’s concepts of intersubjectivity, musicality, and sympathy, as well as by his early writings on children’s semiogenesis, this chapter discusses the dance of relational emotions as the driving force for early communicative and semiolinguistic development of infants, focusing not only on the intersubjective dyads where miraculous narratives are constantly created but especially on those context factors as well, which may have a negative impact on the emotion regulation in vulnerable mother/caretaker–child dyads, such as disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds or institutional care. This chapter provides a short overview of our manifold methodological attempts to investigate these intricate and subtle intersubjective relations. It draws on research examples from our Leibniz Laboratory for Relational Communication Research. We propose a conceptual framework that shows the paradigmatic trajectory from an individualistic and rationalistic research paradigm to an intersubjective and emotion integrating research paradigm or from ‘logos’ to dialogue.