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

The present study addresses young childrens (three-to five-year-olds) peer interactions and explores a recurrent interactional genre, i.e. childrens 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 pre-schools in Sweden. By using Multimodal Interaction Analysis (Goodwin, 2000) of video -recordings from everyday activities, we examine the verbal, embodied and material fea-tures of childrens 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 recipients 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 speakers stance through the affective quality of their response. In all, detailed interactional analysis reveals the young childrens interactional repertoires and the communicative challenges associated with childrens peer interactions. Funding Agencies|Swedish Research Council [742-2013-7626]