Voicing infant talk: Infant's agency in Spanish family interactions

Abstract

In a moment in which society frequently legitimizes the narrative that young children are “goal-oriented”, “competent” and “agents”, this paper denaturalizes this core value through empirical examples of how agency is enacted in family practices in which parents and siblings animate infant “speech” (voicing), fortifying the child's active family membership. The paper draws from a multimodal, longitudinal, ethnographic study examining the language socialization of infants in Spanish middle-class families from Madrid. In dialogue with a relational approach to agency, voicing is analyzed to showcase how the social construction of babies' agency dynamically changes in different positions (e. g. between competence and vulnerability) and in different verbal and no-verbal attunements between babies and family members. As we consider the interactional and verbal routine of voicing, we also move to a more vaguely defined terrain of undervalued dimensions, such as infant vocalizations and other forms of multimodal and embodied communicative practices, as they co-occur in socio-material ensembles.