Reference as an Interactive Achievement: Sequential and Longitudinal Analyses of Labeling Interactions in Shared Book Reading and Free Play

Abstract

The present study examines how young children and their caregivers establish reference by jointly developing stable patterns of bodily, perceptual, and interactive coordination. Our longitudinal investigation focuses on two mother–child dyads engaged in picture-book reading and play. The dyads were videotaped at home once every 6 weeks while the children aged from 9 to 24 months. Inspired by conversation analysis and multimodal analysis, our developmental approach builds on the insight that the situated and embodied production of reference is fundamentally an interactive achievement. To examine the acquisition of reference, we developed a descriptive instrument that takes account of not only the dyad's joint accomplishment but also each participant's contributions to it. The instrument is based on the sequential reconstruction of the jobs that both participants have to accomplish jointly in order to achieve reference: establishing visual perception as a relevant resource, constituting a domain of scrutiny, locating a target, and construing the (meaning of the) referent. Methodologically, these jobs serve as a tertium comparationis for the longitudinal comparison of both the adult's as well as the child's contributions to establishing reference. We used this instrument to examine (1) what bodily and verbal resources the participants employed, and (2) how their contributions to accomplishing the jobs changed over time. Findings showed that the acquisition of reference was closely related to the child's increasing ability to recognize, fulfill, and set up conditional relevancies. We conclude that the adult's dynamic and contextualized use of conditional relevancies, recipient design, and observability is a crucial driving force in the acquisition of reference.

Multimodale Kommunikation in frühen Buchlesesituationen und ihr Zusammenhang mit dem späteren Wortschatz

“…Der Gestengebrauch der Kinder korrelierte auch mit ihrem eigenen späteren Wortschatz [16]. Marcos [20] berichtet, dass Mütter, sobald sie bei ihren Kindern bestimmte kommunikative Mittel häufiger beobachteten, ihre eigene Kommunikation stärker in Richtung Lautsprache veränderten [31]: Sie zeigten weniger und antworteten häufiger nur lautsprachlich, wenn die Kinder selbst mehr Zeigegesten nutzten.…”

“…Beim Betrachten von Bilderbüchern werden referenzielle Bezüge hergestellt und gemeinsam interaktive Ziele verfolgt [3,31], wie das Benennen von Objekt (-eigenschaften) oder Identifizieren bestimmter Referenten. Dies geschieht beim Buchlesen häufiger als in anderen pragmatischen Situationen, z.…”

“…Merke Wir wissen aus Studien, dass sich verschiedene Kommunikationssituationen hinsichtlich der Verwendung kommunikativer Mittel unterscheiden [2,34,35]. Das gemeinsame Buchlesen ermöglicht in besonderer Weise ein interaktives und auf Kommunikation ausgerichtetes Miteinander mit gemeinsamen Zielen [3,31], welches sprachlichen Fähigkeiten nützt.…”

Levels of Coordination in Early Semantic Development

“…For example, local dependencies felt hopelessly insufficient when accounting for the developing ability of infants to differentiate the degree of their participation across sequences of actions: the sensitivity to local cues when playing peek-a-boo, for example, seemed to be moderated by what has happened several 'steps in a game' before . Similarly, research on language learning, closely connected to the EASE project (Heller & Rohlfing, 2017;Rohlfing, Wrede, Vollmer, & Oudeyer, 2016), demonstrated the necessity of going beyond simple object-word associations and understanding the role of a word in larger, shared 'pragmatic frames', which develop through a history of joint practice. Equally importantly, our insights into the process of the emergence of symbolic communication in early development (Rączaszek-Leonardi, Nomikou, Rohlfing, & Deacon, 2018) rely on recognizing the role of the systemic level of utterances and how those relate to more complex action organization and control.…”

“…The work tackled the problem of the development of 'joint practice' in a more holistic way and from a complementary perspective: facing the richness, complexity, and messiness of everyday natural interaction, the central question became how participants manage to jointly practice these complex activities from early on. This question invites us to look at learning and development as "transformation in engagement" (Rossmanith et al, in preparation), where both, participants' skills and the enacted niche, get increasingly organized over time, giving rise to larger scale and more complex differentiated forms of interaction and coordination, including narratives and language (also see Heller & Rohlfing, 2017). In this paper, we can show only a preview of the multiple steps towards such complex organizations.…”