Right to Talk: Socializing Young Children’s Epistemic Autonomy to Talk about Themselves

• In Event: 40810 - Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology: Navigating Knowledge, credibility, and Accountability in Talk

Abstract

Parent-child interactions are fundamentally shaped by norms that assume, establish, and reinforce asymmetries in conversational rights and obligations (Sacks, 1992). A growing body of research in conversation analysis has highlighted how parents position their children as having restricted rights to talk (Butler & Wilkinson, 2013; Forrester, 2010; O’Reilly, 2006 ), even when communicating their own thoughts, sensations, and experiences — matters that, based on norms of adult interaction, would be unequivocally recognized as belonging to their epistemic domain (Liu, 2023). However, parents also bear primary responsibility for socializing their children into becoming competent participants in interaction (Filipi, 2009; Goodwin & Cekaite, 2013; Keel, 2016). This dual role raises important questions about how parents navigate the balance between asserting their parental authority and fostering their children’s epistemic autonomy — the ability to communicate independently about what they know.
Drawing on naturally occurring parent-child interactional data, this study explores how parents work to engage young children to talk about themselves within the asymmetrical structure of parent-child interaction. Focusing on speaker selection in question-answer sequences involving young children, I analyze the ways parents negotiate their children’s rights and obligations as next speakers (Sacks et al., 1974). Key parental practices include 1) implicitly affirming children’s rights to talk and 2) explicitly enforcing children’s obligation to talk. These interactional practices position children as autonomous epistemic agents, reinforcing their right and accountability to express their own thoughts. By examining these parental practices, this study contributes to the understanding of how epistemic autonomy is cultivated in early childhood and highlights the ways through which children are socialized to become competent participants in everyday interaction.

Author

• Ruey-Ying Liu, National Chengchi University