Social-Ecological Constraints on Children's Communicative Strategies

This paper focuses on how the socio-ecological environment provides specific socially-defined opportunities for interaction and talk. The socially defined character of the different areas of a nursery school are seen as the generated product of both the conventionalised expectations, and the accustomed, practiced expectations which are the product of pathways of usage and performance specifics which arise from the habitual usages of certain areas. These two kinds of expectations are responsible for the communicative activities and strategies of the children in different areas. In this way the notion of context is broadened and given a sociological significance which it lacks in psycholinguistic studies of childrens' language. Such a study of language in action is concerned not with the linguist's notion of meaning, but with language as a social performance of situated meaning and the negotiated understandings that arise from this. In the analysis of sample conversations we explore how through peer play children generate a social order which differs from adult conceptions. The conversations taken from interaction in three differently identified areas of the nursery, indicate that children have different sociolinguistic conventions from adults and that their play activities generate their own interactive realizations.