CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Gene H. Lerner and Don H. Zimmerman (Sociology, UCSB), April 28, 2000.

"Action and the Appearance of Action in the Conduct of Very Young Children."

In the first part of this talk we report on the use of body behavior as observable action among very young children, and in particular, we show how the observability of this conduct is itself a resource for accomplishing action in interaction. Specifically, we examine two ways that objects are recurrently employed by very young children: presenting an object to another child and putting an object away ("doing being done") and explore how these actions can be, and are, used to accomplish something else. In each case, the recognizable or exposed course of action turns out to have one or another embedded trajectories that differs from or subsumes its initial appearance (a mock presentation or tease, and an embedded attempt to retrieve an object, respectively). By showing that they can employ the appearance of one action to accomplish something else, even very young children reveal a formal orientation to the observability their own body behavior as social action in a situated course of action.

In the second part of this talk we hope to report some preliminary observations concerning the practices very young children employ that may result in engagement with another child without specifically inviting another child to participate in a joint activity. This might be thought of as 'occasioned engagement' rather than 'initiated (or invited) engagement'. In sequence organizational terms, such practices furnish a way to launch social engagement or play from SECOND position -- in response to another's action -- rather than from FIRST position, in which a child must specifically design an action that invites another child to engage in play. This may be one developmental solution to the problem of establishing peer relations before methods for directly initiating engagements are fully developed and available.