Research on the development of social interactions has shown how caregivers and infants, from the moment of birth, reciprocally accommodate patterns of behaviors. The infant develops various innate competencies through approaches from a caregiver, creates interaction patterns, and begins to appropriate culture through imitation (Kaye, 1982; Tomasello, 1999). The relation between the particularity and universality that characterizes caregiver-infant interaction systems, however, has yet to be analyzed.
In this vein, studies of language socialization have developed theoretical tools to illuminate how each community's habitus of communicative codes, practices, and strategies is related to its socio-cultural logic (Ochs, 1988; Duranti, 1997; Ochs, Solomon & Sterponi, 2005). This chapter establishes a theoretical perspective on language socialization before speech and clarifies the ethnographic distinctiveness of caregiver-infant interactions among the |Gui/||Gana, two neighboring groups of the San. A |Gui/||Gana mother usually nurses her infant for a few minutes at a time, with short intervals between nursing. Young infants react to the proximal context using a narrow variety of actions, whereas the mother was involved in a much wider participation framework, reacting to the infant only after a fretful movement. This is one reason for the distinctive nursing pattern.
Moreover, infant sucking was negatively correlated with "gymnastic" behavior (standing or jumping on a caregiver's lap). Caregivers frequently induced infant stepping movements, created rhythms in caregiver-child interactions, and thereby made interactions pleasurable. As such, corporeality is omnipresent in caregiver-infant interactions. The |Gui/||Gana have several language genres, which introduce communicative musicality in caregiver-infant interactions. Rhe |kii of tsando, a song-for-infants, makes use of melody to accommodate infant actions and often involves infants in multi-party interactions. Analysis demonstrates that "what might appear to be the transparent physicality of the body" may evolve through the history of practitioners' involvement with "a complex, nuanced interplay of social and cultural forces (Hanks, 1996: 248)".
Facilitated by these forces, even a young infant produces responses according to the expectancy of the caregiver. These early forms of "responsibility" pave the way for the infant to take part in more complicated interactions in later life, such as performances of imitation. Previous studies on imitation have asserted that a prerequisite for the transmission of culture is that all members of the social system share common aims. Alternatively, without assuming culture as constructed in the child's inner world, language socialization research illuminates how caregivers and children collaboratively realize cultural meanings via children's involvement in the participation frameworks of a given speech community long before becoming able to perform imitation

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