Recruiting Assistance in Early Childhood: Longitudinal Changes in the Use of “Oh+X” as a Way of Reporting Trouble in German

ABSTRACT

Based on longitudinal audiovisual data from family interactions, we focus on how young children between 1;08 and 2;10 report trouble they are encountering in their current activity using the response cry oh in combination with other lexical items (e.g., “oh fell off”) and bodily displays. While at a very young age the children remain focused on their activity and try to solve the problem independently, at an older age they start to systematically use gaze directed toward the parent and suspension of the current activity to enlist the adult’s assistance. We argue that these bodily displays are among the resources whose presence or absence constrains whether the report of trouble leads to the recruitment of assistance or not. Regarding the developmental implications, it seems that during their third year of life, young children expand their repertoire for dealing with trouble interactively. Data are in German with English translations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ These conventions slightly deviate from Jefferson-style transcription. For example, “(-)” is used for short estimated pauses, “_” indicates cliticizations within units.

² The declaration of consent does not allow us to make the corpus publicly available.

³ The word “nant” is a monosyllabic form of the noun “Elefant,” which can be considered typical for early language use. It additionally contains a substitution of “n” for “f.”

⁴ On adult’s responses to children’s crying, cf. Cekaite and Holm Kvist (2017).

⁵ On a moral level, the difference between the mother’s actions in Examples 4 and 5 suggests that it is not the spillage itself that is treated as inacceptable but the fact that the same mishap occurs twice in quick succession (see also the use of jetzt [“now”] in her turn, highlighting temporality).

⁶ The boy’s turn accomplishing the request contains a self-initiated self-repair: He interrupts a word, hearable as the beginning of a verb with the wrong initial particle ab (“un-”), and substitutes this particle for an (“re-”).

⁷ See also Barth-Weingarten et al. (2020), who observe a range of different prosodic-phonetic designs of free-standing oh in response to informings in English.

⁸ On the negotiation of agency in directive sequences involving older children, see Aronsson and Cekaite (2011).

Additional information

Funding

This work was carried out as part of the project “Exclamations in Interaction: Formal, Functional and Visual Aspects” (principal investigator: Martin Pfeiffer), supported by the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung with a Postdoctoral Fellowship for Leading Early Career Researchers from 2017 until 2020. This research was also supported by a Junior Fellowship (2020-2021) of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) awarded to Martin Pfeiffer.