Young children need to acquire a range of competencies as they learn how to engage in everyday interaction with those around them.
Now new research, contained in a recently-published book by University psychologist Dr Michael Forrester, sheds fresh light on the significance of various forms of parent-child interaction in this process.
The book, titled Early Social Interaction: A Case Comparison of Developmental Pragmatics and Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge University Press), provides a first account of the interplay between what the child does and what the child feels.
The research is expected to make a significant contribution towards advancing the study of early social relations in developmental psychology, with the video-recordings available for other researchers to make use of.
Dr Forrester, of the University’s School of Psychology, used a video-recorded study of his own daughter learning how to talk, analysing her conversation in everyday family contexts and building a detailed picture of her early development.
Among other things, the recordings reveal that learning how to answer questions appropriately rests on children recognising that, as they get older, other people increasingly expect more appropriate answers. Further, alongside learning all about the rules and conventions used in conversation, the recordings showed that a child also learns what cannot be said: what they shouldn’t say or do.
Dr Forrester explained that what is significant about learning how to talk is not only about a child learning all the relevant social action (doing talk-in-interaction) but also learning how to monitor their own and other people’s feelings (displays of emotion).