Learning to Talk and Keep Silent about Everyday Routines: a study of verbal interaction between young children and their caregivers

Abstract

Abstract This article reports on a study of child‐caregiver conversations within a highly redundant caretaking routine in a preschool setting. The problem addressed is whether children receive subtle verbal cues that inform them how to talk about the everyday routine. The adults were found to respond differentially to child utterances that anticipated, accompanied and succeeded the routine component they referred to. The adults tended to offer a semantically contingent response when the children were anticipating the routine, while they tended to ignore child utterances referring to what was simultaneously going on. By responding contingently in a selective way the adults also communicated what did not need to be talked about, but could be presupposed and taken for granted. It is suggested that this finding might illustrate how early precursors of decontextualized language skills are embedded in the acculturation of children.