[Mother's language addressed to her baby during the 1st year: value in studying early interactions]

This article aims to demonstrate the value of the analysis of maternal language in the study of mother-infant interactions. It reviews questions confronting three types of data in the literature: modifications in the language of mothers when they address a baby, the early mother infant interactions in their verbal and non-verbal aspects, the recent linguistic findings and notably those of utterance acts theory. The different approaches discussed complement each other. Through them one sees how the analysis of maternal language can enrich the description of observable behavior in mother-child interactions and can make possible the exploration of the successive representations which the mother has both of her child and of herself as a maternal figure. In conclusion, we propose several lines of inquiry, drawn from utterance acts theory, which reveals the relationship between the words addressed to the baby, the partners in the interaction, and the situational context. This permits us to look at the way in which the baby's identity as a subject is progressively constituted for the mother.