Conversation Analysis and Child Language Acquisition

Abstract

Child‐focused research in conversation analysis (child‐CA) has been steadily coming into its own as it continues to amass a considerable body of work on the ways that children learn to talk as they become competent members of a culture. While there is an increasingly diverse set of contexts, themes, and disciplines that are drawn on in this work, it is nonetheless commonly driven by a microanalytic, naturally occurring, and in situ concern with showing how children participate, understand, and display interactional competencies in dealing with, finding a place in, and making sense of their social worlds. The discussion in this entry of both consolidating and emerging themes in child‐CA research, limited to children aged from 12 months to seven years, is framed by two very broad, general areas that subsume a number of discrete themes. They are (a) competencies and understandings, and (b) childhood and interactions in pre‐ and early‐primary school settings.

Symbolic play as a zone of proximal development: An analysis of informational exchange

“…Conversational Analysis studies the gradient of knowledge, or informational exchange, between interlocutors in speech (Sacks, 1963, 1984; Schegloff, 2007a, 2007b). While a field of study in its own right, its use as a methodology in studies of infant development is less common (see Filipi, 2020; Forrester, 2013). Our study was inspired by one particular approach summarised in Heritage (2012), which inspects implicit epistemic stance (ES) (i.e., a speaker's knowledge status concerning a statement) within turns based on the responses of the speakers.…”