The shape of child-initiated pretend play in interactions with a parent at ages 15 months and 3

Recently, family storytelling practices from the perspective of conversation analysis have occupied intense research interest. Studies within this tradition have shed light on children’s participation in tellings, interactional competence, bilingual practices, the displays of knowledge and changes in their participation over time. The focus in these studies has mainly been on storybook reading and invitations to recount events. In the study to be reported here, episodes of pretend play were analysed. The samples selected for analysis pertained to one child, Rosie, while interacting with her mother at the ages of 15 months and 3. Attention to interactional changes in pretend play was an additional focus. The analytic interest of the study was to show how Rosie at 15 months initiated pretend play through embodied resources using toys or objects that were immediately available in the physical space as they became characters and objects through the supported actions of the mother. At the age of 3, Rosie initiated the enacted story through a greater number of verbal resources including voice projection and the “I know + pause + you can be” role suggestion format. The study’s contribution to the field lies in reporting the earliest example of storytelling and in showing how fine-grained multimodal analysis of naturally occurring interactions is extremely important if we are to get at what very young children can actually do in interaction.