Positioning updates as relevant
An analysis of child-initiated updating in American and Canadian families
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.37286Keywords:
updating, family communication, family relationships, conversation analysis, sequence organizationAbstract
Telling about your day is a documented component of close relationships. In examining nearly 31 hours of video-recorded English-speaking American and Canadian families with young children primarily between the ages of three and six, this paper analyses how children solve the problem of producing relevant updates about the goings on of their day. Findings indicate that child-initiated updates are ‘touched off ’ by prior talk or something in the immediate environment. I find that child-initiated updates occur in three sequential environments: (1) when they are prompted by a specific word/ phrase, (2) when they are prompted by an object in the locally immediate environment, and (3) when they are prompted by the local ongoing activity. Importantly, these updates are retrospectively activated in that they are responsive to what just occurred before, but also initiate a new sequence. The updating practices described here provide further evidence of the interactional sophistication of young children in that they show how children can exploit the ongoing environment to deliver updates about their own lives.
References
Bauer, P. J. (1996). What do infants recall of their lives? Memory for specific events by one- to two-year-olds. American Psychologist, 51(1), 29–41. http://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.51.1.29
Bauer, P. J. (2002). Building toward a past: Construction of a reliable long-term memory. In N. L. Stein, P. J. Bauer, & M. Rabinowitz (Eds.), Representaion, memory, and development: Essays in honor of Jean Mandler(pp. 17–42). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Blum-Kulka, S. (1993). “You gotta know how to tell a story”: Telling, tales, and tellers in American and Israeli narrative events at dinner. Language in Society, 22(03), 361. http://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500017280
Blum-Kulka, S. (1994). The dynamics of family dinner talk: Cultural contexts for children’s passages to adult discourse. Research on Language & Social Interaction. http://doi.org/10.1207/s15327973rlsi2701_1
Blum-Kulka, S. (1997). Dinner talk: Cultural patterns of sociability and socialization in family discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bolden, G., & Mandelbaum, J. (2017). The use of conversational co-remembering to corroborate contentious claims. Discourse Studies, 19(1). http://doi.org/10.1177/1461445616683593
Drew, P., & Chilton, K. (2000). Calling to keep in touch: Regular and habitualised telephone calls as an environment for small talk. In Small Talk(pp. 137–162). Retrieved from http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/68481/
Edwards, D., & Middleton, D. (1988). Conversational remembering and family relationships: How children learn to remember. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 5, 3–25.
Farrant, K., & Reese, E. (2000). Maternal style and children’s participation in reminiscing: Stepping stones in children’s autobiographical memory development. Journal of Cognition and Development, 1(2), 193–225.
Fivush, R., Haden, C. A., & Reese, E. (2006). Elaborating on elaborations: Role of maternal reminiscing style in cognitive and socioemotional development. Child Development, 77(6), 1568–1588.
Freese, J., & Maynard, D. W. (1998). Prosodic features of bad news and good news in conversation. Language in Society, 27(2), 195–219.
Gathercole, S. E. (1998). The development of memory. Journal of Child Psychology Psychiatry,39(1), 3–27.
Goodman, G. S., Rudy, L., Bottoms, B. L., & Aman, C. (1990). Children’s concerns and memory: Issues of ecological validity in the study of children’s eyewitness testimony. In Knowing and remembering in young children(pp. 249–284). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Goodwin, C. (1979). The interactive construction of a sentence in natural conversation. Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, 37(633), 97–121.
Goodwin, C. (1980). Restarts, pauses, and the achievement of a state of mutual gaze at turn?beginning. Sociological Inquiry, 50(3–4), 272–302. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1980.tb00023.x
Goodwin, C. (1984). Notes on story structure and the organization of participation. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis(p. 225–246). http://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511665868.016
Goodwin, C. (1986). Gestures as a resource for the organization of mutual orientation. Semiotica,62(1–2), 29–49. http://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1986.62.1-2.29
Haden, C. A., Haine, R. A., & Fivush, R. (1997). Developing narrative structure in parent-child reminiscing across the preschool years. Developmental Psychology, 33(2), 295–307. http://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.33.2.295
Heritage, J. (1984). A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Action(pp. 299–345). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heritage, J. (2013). Action formation and its epistemic (and other) backgrounds. Discourse Studies, 15(5), 551–578. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461445613501449
Jefferson, G. (1984). On stepwise transition from talk about a trouble to inappropriately next-positioned matters. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis(pp. 191–222). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jefferson, G. (1987). On exposed and embedded corrections. In G. Button & J. R. E. Lee (Eds.), Talk and Social Organisation(pp. 86–100). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Kidwell, M. (2005). Gaze as social control: How very young children differentiate “the look” from a “mere look” by their adult caregivers. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 38(4), 417–449.
Kidwell, M. (2012). Interaction among children. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis(pp. 511–532). Oxford: Blackwell.
Kidwell, M., & Zimmerman, D. (2006). “Observability” in the interactions of very young children. Communication Monographs, 73(1), 1–28. http://doi.org/10.1080/03637750600559673
Lerner, G. H. (1992). Assisted storytelling: Deploying shared knowledge as a practical matter. Qualitative Sociology, 15(3), 247–271. http://doi.org/10.1007/BF00990328
Lerner, G. H. (1993). Collectivities in action: Establishing the relevance of conjoined participation in conversation. Text, 13(2), 213–246. http://doi.org/10.1515/text.1.1993.13.2.213
Lerner, G. H., Zimmerman, D. H., & Kidwell, M. (2011). Formal structures of practical tasks: A resource for action in the social life of very young children. In Embodied Interaction: Language and Body in the Material World(pp. 44–58).
Lerner, G., & Kitzinger, C. (2007). Extraction and aggregation in the repair of individual and collective self-reference. Discourse Studies, 9(4), 526–557. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461445607079165
Mandelbaum, J. (1987). Couples sharing stories. Communication Quarterly, 35(2), 144–170. http://doi.org/10.1080/01463378709369678
Mandelbaum, J. (1989). Interpersonal activities in conversational storytelling. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 53(2), 114–126.
Maynard, D. W. (1997). The news delivery sequence: Bad news and good news in conversational interaction. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 30(2), 93–130.
Middleton, D., & Brown, S. D. (2005). The Social Psychology of Experience.
Miller, P. J., & Sperry, L. L. (1988). Early talk about the past: the origins of conversational stories of personal experience. Journal of Child Language,15(2), 293–315. http://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900012381
Murachver, T. (2002). A stitch in time: The fabric and context of events. In N. L. Stein, P. J. Bauer, & M. Rabinowitz (Eds.), Representation, memory, and development: Essays in honor of Jean Mandler(pp. 145–160). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Nelson, K., & Fivush, R. (2004). The emergence of autobiographical memory: A social cultural developmental theory. Psychological Review, 111(2), 486–511. http://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.111.2.486
Nevile, M., Haddington, P., Heinemann, T., & Rauniomaa, M. (2014). Interacting with objects: Language, materiality, and social activity.Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ochs, E., & Taylor, C. (1992). Family narrative as political activity. Discourse & Society. http://doi.org/10.1177/0957926592003003003
Ochs, E., & Taylor, C. (1996). “The father knows best” dynamic in family dinner narratives. In K. Hall (Ed.), Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self.(pp. 97–121). Routledge.
Ochs, E., Taylor, C., Rudolph, D., & Smith, R. (1992). Storytelling as a theory?building activity. Discourse Processes, 15, 37–72. http://doi.org/10.1080/01638539209544801
Pomerantz, A. M., & Mandelbaum, J. (2005). A conversation analytic approach to relationships.pdf. In Handbook of Language and Social Interaction(pp. 149–171).
Sachs, J. (1983). Talking about the there and then: The emergence of displaced reference in parent-child discourse. In K. E. Nelson (Ed.), Children’s language. New York: Gardner Press.
Sacks, H. (1995). Harvey Sacks Lectures on Conversation. (G. Jefferson, Ed.)Lectures on Conversation.
Sacks, H., & Schegloff, E. a. (1979). Two preferences in the organization of reference to persons in conversation and their interaction. Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, 15–21. http://doi.org/10.2307/2066919
Schegloff, E. a. (2007). Categories in action: person-reference and membership categorization. Discourse Studies, 9(4), 433–461. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461445607079162
Schegloff, E. A. (1980). Preliminaries to preliminaries:“Can I ask you a question?” Sociological Inquiry, (April), 104–152. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1980.tb00018.x
Schegloff, E. A. (1982). Discourse as an interactional achievement: Some uses of “uh huh” and other things that come between sentences. In Analyzing discourse: Text and talk(pp. 71–93).
Schegloff, E. A. (1988). On an actual virtual servo-mechanism for guessing bad news: A single case conjecture. Social Problems, 35(4), 442–457. http://doi.org/10.1525/sp.1988.35.4.03a00080
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schneider, W., & Ornstein, P. A. (2015). The development of children’s memory. Child Development Perspectives, 9(3), 190–195. http://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12129
Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. B. K. (1981). Narrative, literacy, and face in interethnic communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Stivers, T. (2004). “No no no” and other types of multiple sayings in social interaction. Human Communication Research, 30(2), 260–293. http://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/30.2.260
Wingard, L. (2006). Parents’ inquires about homework: The first mention. Text and Talk,26(4/5), 573–596. http://doi.org/10.1515/TEXT.2006.023
Wootton, A. (2010). “Actually” and the sequential skills of a two-year-old. In H. Gardner & M. Forrester (Eds.), Analysing interactions in childhood: Insights from conversation analysis(pp. 42–58). West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Bauer, P. J. (2002). Building toward a past: Construction of a reliable long-term memory. In N. L. Stein, P. J. Bauer, & M. Rabinowitz (Eds.), Representaion, memory, and development: Essays in honor of Jean Mandler(pp. 17–42). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Blum-Kulka, S. (1993). “You gotta know how to tell a story”: Telling, tales, and tellers in American and Israeli narrative events at dinner. Language in Society, 22(03), 361. http://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500017280
Blum-Kulka, S. (1994). The dynamics of family dinner talk: Cultural contexts for children’s passages to adult discourse. Research on Language & Social Interaction. http://doi.org/10.1207/s15327973rlsi2701_1
Blum-Kulka, S. (1997). Dinner talk: Cultural patterns of sociability and socialization in family discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bolden, G., & Mandelbaum, J. (2017). The use of conversational co-remembering to corroborate contentious claims. Discourse Studies, 19(1). http://doi.org/10.1177/1461445616683593
Drew, P., & Chilton, K. (2000). Calling to keep in touch: Regular and habitualised telephone calls as an environment for small talk. In Small Talk(pp. 137–162). Retrieved from http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/68481/
Edwards, D., & Middleton, D. (1988). Conversational remembering and family relationships: How children learn to remember. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 5, 3–25.
Farrant, K., & Reese, E. (2000). Maternal style and children’s participation in reminiscing: Stepping stones in children’s autobiographical memory development. Journal of Cognition and Development, 1(2), 193–225.
Fivush, R., Haden, C. A., & Reese, E. (2006). Elaborating on elaborations: Role of maternal reminiscing style in cognitive and socioemotional development. Child Development, 77(6), 1568–1588.
Freese, J., & Maynard, D. W. (1998). Prosodic features of bad news and good news in conversation. Language in Society, 27(2), 195–219.
Gathercole, S. E. (1998). The development of memory. Journal of Child Psychology Psychiatry,39(1), 3–27.
Goodman, G. S., Rudy, L., Bottoms, B. L., & Aman, C. (1990). Children’s concerns and memory: Issues of ecological validity in the study of children’s eyewitness testimony. In Knowing and remembering in young children(pp. 249–284). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Goodwin, C. (1979). The interactive construction of a sentence in natural conversation. Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, 37(633), 97–121.
Goodwin, C. (1980). Restarts, pauses, and the achievement of a state of mutual gaze at turn?beginning. Sociological Inquiry, 50(3–4), 272–302. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1980.tb00023.x
Goodwin, C. (1984). Notes on story structure and the organization of participation. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis(p. 225–246). http://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511665868.016
Goodwin, C. (1986). Gestures as a resource for the organization of mutual orientation. Semiotica,62(1–2), 29–49. http://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1986.62.1-2.29
Haden, C. A., Haine, R. A., & Fivush, R. (1997). Developing narrative structure in parent-child reminiscing across the preschool years. Developmental Psychology, 33(2), 295–307. http://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.33.2.295
Heritage, J. (1984). A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Action(pp. 299–345). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heritage, J. (2013). Action formation and its epistemic (and other) backgrounds. Discourse Studies, 15(5), 551–578. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461445613501449
Jefferson, G. (1984). On stepwise transition from talk about a trouble to inappropriately next-positioned matters. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis(pp. 191–222). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jefferson, G. (1987). On exposed and embedded corrections. In G. Button & J. R. E. Lee (Eds.), Talk and Social Organisation(pp. 86–100). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Kidwell, M. (2005). Gaze as social control: How very young children differentiate “the look” from a “mere look” by their adult caregivers. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 38(4), 417–449.
Kidwell, M. (2012). Interaction among children. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis(pp. 511–532). Oxford: Blackwell.
Kidwell, M., & Zimmerman, D. (2006). “Observability” in the interactions of very young children. Communication Monographs, 73(1), 1–28. http://doi.org/10.1080/03637750600559673
Lerner, G. H. (1992). Assisted storytelling: Deploying shared knowledge as a practical matter. Qualitative Sociology, 15(3), 247–271. http://doi.org/10.1007/BF00990328
Lerner, G. H. (1993). Collectivities in action: Establishing the relevance of conjoined participation in conversation. Text, 13(2), 213–246. http://doi.org/10.1515/text.1.1993.13.2.213
Lerner, G. H., Zimmerman, D. H., & Kidwell, M. (2011). Formal structures of practical tasks: A resource for action in the social life of very young children. In Embodied Interaction: Language and Body in the Material World(pp. 44–58).
Lerner, G., & Kitzinger, C. (2007). Extraction and aggregation in the repair of individual and collective self-reference. Discourse Studies, 9(4), 526–557. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461445607079165
Mandelbaum, J. (1987). Couples sharing stories. Communication Quarterly, 35(2), 144–170. http://doi.org/10.1080/01463378709369678
Mandelbaum, J. (1989). Interpersonal activities in conversational storytelling. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 53(2), 114–126.
Maynard, D. W. (1997). The news delivery sequence: Bad news and good news in conversational interaction. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 30(2), 93–130.
Middleton, D., & Brown, S. D. (2005). The Social Psychology of Experience.
Miller, P. J., & Sperry, L. L. (1988). Early talk about the past: the origins of conversational stories of personal experience. Journal of Child Language,15(2), 293–315. http://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900012381
Murachver, T. (2002). A stitch in time: The fabric and context of events. In N. L. Stein, P. J. Bauer, & M. Rabinowitz (Eds.), Representation, memory, and development: Essays in honor of Jean Mandler(pp. 145–160). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Nelson, K., & Fivush, R. (2004). The emergence of autobiographical memory: A social cultural developmental theory. Psychological Review, 111(2), 486–511. http://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.111.2.486
Nevile, M., Haddington, P., Heinemann, T., & Rauniomaa, M. (2014). Interacting with objects: Language, materiality, and social activity.Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ochs, E., & Taylor, C. (1992). Family narrative as political activity. Discourse & Society. http://doi.org/10.1177/0957926592003003003
Ochs, E., & Taylor, C. (1996). “The father knows best” dynamic in family dinner narratives. In K. Hall (Ed.), Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self.(pp. 97–121). Routledge.
Ochs, E., Taylor, C., Rudolph, D., & Smith, R. (1992). Storytelling as a theory?building activity. Discourse Processes, 15, 37–72. http://doi.org/10.1080/01638539209544801
Pomerantz, A. M., & Mandelbaum, J. (2005). A conversation analytic approach to relationships.pdf. In Handbook of Language and Social Interaction(pp. 149–171).
Sachs, J. (1983). Talking about the there and then: The emergence of displaced reference in parent-child discourse. In K. E. Nelson (Ed.), Children’s language. New York: Gardner Press.
Sacks, H. (1995). Harvey Sacks Lectures on Conversation. (G. Jefferson, Ed.)Lectures on Conversation.
Sacks, H., & Schegloff, E. a. (1979). Two preferences in the organization of reference to persons in conversation and their interaction. Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, 15–21. http://doi.org/10.2307/2066919
Schegloff, E. a. (2007). Categories in action: person-reference and membership categorization. Discourse Studies, 9(4), 433–461. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461445607079162
Schegloff, E. A. (1980). Preliminaries to preliminaries:“Can I ask you a question?” Sociological Inquiry, (April), 104–152. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1980.tb00018.x
Schegloff, E. A. (1982). Discourse as an interactional achievement: Some uses of “uh huh” and other things that come between sentences. In Analyzing discourse: Text and talk(pp. 71–93).
Schegloff, E. A. (1988). On an actual virtual servo-mechanism for guessing bad news: A single case conjecture. Social Problems, 35(4), 442–457. http://doi.org/10.1525/sp.1988.35.4.03a00080
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schneider, W., & Ornstein, P. A. (2015). The development of children’s memory. Child Development Perspectives, 9(3), 190–195. http://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12129
Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. B. K. (1981). Narrative, literacy, and face in interethnic communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Stivers, T. (2004). “No no no” and other types of multiple sayings in social interaction. Human Communication Research, 30(2), 260–293. http://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/30.2.260
Wingard, L. (2006). Parents’ inquires about homework: The first mention. Text and Talk,26(4/5), 573–596. http://doi.org/10.1515/TEXT.2006.023
Wootton, A. (2010). “Actually” and the sequential skills of a two-year-old. In H. Gardner & M. Forrester (Eds.), Analysing interactions in childhood: Insights from conversation analysis(pp. 42–58). West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Published
2019-08-29
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Searles, D. (2019). Positioning updates as relevant: An analysis of child-initiated updating in American and Canadian families. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 3(1-2), 144-167. https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.37286
