Colwyn Trevarthen

PROFILE

Colwyn Trevarthen has long been held in high esteem by early childhood professionals for his groundbreaking research on interactions between mothers and babies. His recent work has focused more specifically on the musicality and emotion that underpin both language and learning. His professional generosity, enthusiasm and scholarship have been recognised internationally.

LINKS

Bruner

Pinker

His life

Colwyn Trevarthen is Emeritus Professor of Child Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Edinburgh. He also holds an Honorary Doctorate in Psychology from the University of Crete, and he has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters. He is on the advisory board of the Pen Green Research Centre and is vice-president of the British Association for Early Childhood Education.

Trevarthen was born and educated in New Zealand but has spent most of his academic life in Edinburgh having joined the department in 1971. After doctoral and post-doctoral research on perceptuo-motor and cognitive functions of the cerebral hemispheres, he worked with Jerome Bruner at Harvard in 1966. His work there has been described as ‘pathfinding investigations on the infant mind’. Using film and video footage Trevarthen was amongst the first to show that babies as young as two months were more skilled and expressive in face-to-face communication than had previously been believed.

His writing

Colwyn Trevarthen continues to be an active researcher, thinker and theorist. He is a much sought-after speaker since he puts forward his theories in a way that underlines his continued enthusiasm and respect for children’s thinking and with humour. Moreover, his talks are usually illustrated with video footage of babies - an attractive combination of communicative approaches.

Trevarthen writes a great many chapters for other people’s books and research papers, but for someone with so much to say of such great importance, Trevarthen has written few books. In 1990 he edited a book on the brain, and another in 1998 on autism. Communicative Musicality, published in 2008, was edited jointly by Trevarthen and Stephen Malloch, a musician and acoustic expert. It explores the intrinsic musical nature of human interaction. The theory of communicative musicality has been developed from Trevarthen’s groundbreaking studies showing how in mother/infant communication there exist elements of musicality - involving patterns of timing and pulse, variations in the way in which the voice is used, and gesture or movement. Without intending to, the exchange between a mother and her infant follow many of the rules of musical performance, including rhythm and timing. This is the first book to be devoted to this topic.

His research and theory

For the past 30 years, Trevarthen’s research with infants and toddlers has focused on communication, including the role of emotions in development from birth. Daniel Stern, a well-known and respected developmental psychologist has suggested that Trevarthen first identified and named the concept of intersubjectivity in 1977. However, Trevarthen generously refers to a number of other theorists (2008) from whom he claims to have learnt about the communicative abilities of babies. Whichever it is, Trevarthen has undoubtedly increased understanding of the communicative abilities of even very young babies.

Intersubjectivity refers to the interactions between adults and babies which Trevarthen suggests is innate or intuitive. Dan Siegel, Daniel Stern and others interested in the development of human minds and communication share the view that newborn infants are born with a facility for puzzling out the differences between theirs and others brains. They learn to share these with others - generally their mothers.

Protoconversation, a term particularly associated with Trevarthen and Bruner, refers to the two-way interactions that go on between adults, especially mothers, and babies. In Communicative Musicality, Trevarthen describes some protoconversations:

Examples of extremely close coordination of the infant’s rudimentary vocalizations of pleasure or excitement with the baby talk of the mother are everywhere to be seen. Apparently, both partners are participating in a single rhythmical beat, as in music. Such timing of the acts of the infant to engage in the same rhythm as that of the mother’s actions has been encountered in the majority of the detailed analyses we have made of fully developed communication. Thus the infant and mother generate a pattern of intention together. Usually, their acts alternate or complement one another.”

Empathy neurons is Trevarthen’s term for mirror neurons (see the section entitled Brain and Body in this book). He suggests that, in imitating others, babies are not simply learning but engaging in an emotionally-charged act of communication.

Trevarthen is also interested in how the rhythms and emotions of children’s play and fantasy, musical games and songs, stories and acts of discovery, with real or imaginary companions, support cultural learning in infancy and preschool years. This in turn has led to the development of his interest in music and what he has termed a theory of ‘communicative musicality’. His current work investigates the rhythms and expressions of ‘musicality’ in vocal and gestural movement, which he believes are the foundation for communicating with children, and supporting their learning and development.

Putting the theory into practice

Trevarthen’s research interests are not purely academic. He is also interested in how parents, teachers and clinicians can support children’s development. His interest in the way in which musicality underpins communication and his observations on infant emotions has led to an interest in nonverbal therapies including music therapy. Besides writing on this subject, he has been involved in founding a centre for music therapy in Bosnia Herzegovina.

Trevarthen is also interested in the role of culture in learning. He has suggested that “a child is born ‘cultural’, that is, born with a disposition for engagement in intense emotional interaction with other human beings, which then immediately activates a process of enculturation”. His theories point out the way in which this is to be seen in practice - discussing for example the way in which young mothers use pop songs rather than traditional rhymes to interact with their babies. They do however adapt the songs to fit in with the universal rules of ‘motherese’, the special use of language and music which adults use with babies.

Observation is the main key to Trevarthen’s understanding and he also believes it to be the key to practitioners’ understanding. Building on work concerning parent-baby interactions and ‘motherese’, he has revealed similar rhythms and tone in teachers’ expression, which he calls ‘teacherese’. He has demonstrated the importance of this form of interaction to collaborative learning and to children’s confidence in expressing their understanding.

His interest in babies has meant his close involvement in guidance for Scottish practitioners working with babies and toddlers up to the age of three. He has collaborated with Helen Marwick to produce for the Scottish Executive a review of all the relevant research findings in order to support the growth of evidence-based practice.

His influence

Many of the students with whom he has been involved at Edinburgh University have gone on to be highly influential themselves. Lynne Murray, for example, has produced important work on the impact of mothers’ depression on children’s social and language development. His interest in musicality chimes with the work of a number of theorists and researchers from many different fields or disciplines. Evolutionary psychologists, anthropologists, musicians and archeologists are all working to understand the role of music in human development. Trevarthen has long been at the forefront of this interest, but his recent writing on communicative musicality, developed with Stephen Malloch during his supposed retirement, has been welcomed by both musicians and psychologists.

Colwyn Trevarthen has also been instrumental in helping practitioners and others to respect the power of the human mind and to understand that this power is already evident in the actions of a baby. He writes of the way in which:

Innate, intuitive powers of the mind in a brain that moves the thousands of muscles in the body with such sensitive awareness of what will happen, are not properly understood by a psychology that accepts a model of consciousness, intelligence and personality, that focuses only on the cognitive processing of information.

He continues:

a richer, more common sense philosophy is gaining ground. …Every live human person has some of this intuitive capacity to share intentions and feelings, and to make friends.

(Communicative Musicality 2008)

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Comment

Although there are few criticisms of Trevarthen’s theories, postmodern deconstructive theories have been highly critical of such developmental theories. Burman in particular criticises the notion of a predisposition to being social. She singles out intersubjectivity as being too reliant on what she terms “an impoverished and insufficiently analysed understanding of what it means to be social”. She suggests that not all the studies - she singles out the studies of Bradley, who was Trevarthen’s student - have been successfully replicated. That is to say that other researchers have not been able to come up with similar results. She goes on to suggest that even where results are verified their meaning has been over generalised, taking insufficient account of cultural differences. Even if these criticisms were justified in 1994, fifteen years later they can not easily be upheld.

A second area for comment is about music. See the section on Pinker for more detail.

Points for reflection

References

Communicative Musicality edited by Stephen Malloch and Colwyn Trevarthen (Oxford University Press 2008)

How the mind works Steven Pinker (Penguin Books 1997)

‘Intuition for Human Communication’ by Colwyn Trevarthen in Promoting Social Interaction for Individuals with Communication Impairments edited by Suzanne Zeedyk (Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2008)

Review of Childcare and the Development of Children aged 0-3: Research Evidence and Implications for Out-of-Home Provision Colwyn Trevarthen and Helen Marwick (Scottish Executive 2002)

Deconstructing Developmental Psychology Erica Burman (Routledge 1994)

Where to find out more

www.literacytrust.org.uk