Infants experiences are often thought to influence social and intellectual
development in the individual, and on a societal level they are sometimes credited
for some of the distinctiveness that typifies cultural style. To compare and
contrast the experiences of French and U.S. American infants, mother-infant dyads in
Paris and in New York City were observed interacting in the natural setting of their
homes. This report focuses on infants' visual attention, tactual exploration, and
vocalisation and on mothers' mediated and unmediated stimulation and speech to
infants. The study had two main goals: One was to identify and describe activities
and interaction patterns that may be similar and different in these two Western
cultures, and the other was to test the cross-cultural validity of a hypothesis that
states that specific mother and infant activities relate to one another in dyadic
interaction. Mothers and infants in the two cultures showed some similarities and
some different emphases in their activities, and patterns of mother-infant
interaction in the two cultures tended to correspond.
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