Calibrating joint attention and affective stances in young children's peer interactions

Abstract

The present study addresses young children's (three-to five-year-olds’) peer interactions and explores a recurrent interactional genre, i.e. children's affectively heightened attention-organizing practices used when initiating an exchange in preschool interactions in Sweden. The data consists of 40 h of video recordings collected in two regular preschools in Sweden. By using Multimodal Interaction Analysis (Goodwin, 2000) of video-recordings from everyday activities, we examine the verbal, embodied and material features of children's interactions. The analysis shows that children exploited common access to objects or physical personal attributes within their socio-material environment and relied on them to secure the others’ attention, while using various methods for making the object ‘noteworthy’. By indexing their affective stance towards the referent, the children created the interpretative framework for the recipient's response. However, the recipients’ orientation and stance alignment were not to be presumed. The peer responses comprised a continuum of their affective engagement: the children aligned with or downplayed the prior speaker's stance through the affective quality of their response. In all, detailed interactional analysis reveals the young children's interactional repertoires and the communicative challenges associated with children's peer interactions.