The Coordination of Talk and Touch in Adults’ Directives to Children: Touch and Social Control

Abstract

Adults sometimes accompany the directives they issue to children about their actions and movements with bodily contact (for example, shoving, guiding, or pushing). This article explores the interactional uses and meanings of such combinations of spoken directive and bodily contact that involves touch in data from families and primary educational settings in Sweden. The focus is on how the timing and coordination of haptics (communicative acts of touch), speech, and contextual factors produce communicative meanings. Findings reveal how touch and talk are synchronized to achieve the child’s compliance to directives. Laminated (that is, multimodal) directives combine concurrent use of imperatives with adults’ own haptic acts, signaling and enforcing the onset and/or trajectory of the required movement. They constitute the prevalent pattern of use, as compared to the use of control touch without accompanying verbalization. Haptic control formats are usually responsive to the child recipient’s noncompliant responses. The data are in Swedish with English translation.