Introduction

Looking at a longitudinal corpus of mother-child play-interactions, we found that although almost all participants aim at carrying out joint play-projects, some of the children are much more oriented than others to actively participate in the respective play-projects. We also observed that some mothers systematically adjust their bodily behaviour to that of their children during the course of the interaction. We then asked whether these two observations are systematically correlated. If so, we can utter the hypothesis that children’s active participation in joint activities with their caregivers can be encouraged and enhanced through efforts in speech and movement synchronisation.

The relevance of a longitudinal approach to different degrees of orientation towards active participation relies on the assumption that “becoming a member [of a community] means both to learn how to perform one’s own agentive and creative participant’s work and to coproduce and understand the interactional order in accountable ways” (Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2021: 130). In this contribution, we focus on the first aspect, i.e. how children learn to perform their own agentive participant’s work and how mothers help their children experience their own agency.

We will proceed as follows: first, we will briefly lay out our theoretical framework, i.e. conversation analytic perspectives on participation (“Theoretical framework: participation from a conversation analytic perspective” section). We will then present our data and method (“Data and method” section). In the “Results of our longitudinal case studies” section, we present the results of our empirical studies: we illustrate practices of achieving participation in a double longitudinal case study, contrasting two dyads at age 1 and at age 5, respectively, before summarising our empirical findings (Conclusion: does synchronisation foster children’s active participation play-interactions?” section) and finally discussing the relevance of these findings (“Discussion” section).

Theoretical framework: participation from a conversation analytic perspective

This study builds on the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis (CA; Schegloff, 2007; Sidnell, 2016). CA uses recordings of everyday interactions in order to reconstruct specific practices within a community to reflectively create and recreate social order. More specifically, it observes how speakers systematically organise turn-taking, how they make social actions recognisable in coherent sequences of interaction, and how they repair possible problems of speaking, hearing, or understanding that may emerge during social interaction. A growing body of comparative studies (cf. Floyd et al., 2020; Rossano et al., 2009; Fox et al., 2009; Wu, 2009) claims that these dimensions of interaction are present across completely unrelated languages and are, therefore, universal (Dingemanse & Floyd, 2014; Kendrick et al., 2020).

In the realm of CA, participation in talk-in-interaction has been conceptualised as “actions demonstrating forms of involvement performed by parties within evolving structures of talk” (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2005: 222). In order to experience active participation, actions have to be coordinated moment-by-moment by two or more interactants (Sidnell, 2009: 125). For participation to be successful, actions in interaction are recipient-designed and can only be fully understood with respect to how they are responded to (Enfield & Sidnell, 2017: 516).

Moreover, participants not only display to one another what they are currently doing but also how they expect their coparticipants to align themselves towards their performed move (Goodwin, 1999).

While building actions together, coparticipants can contribute to the emergent action by assisting with the ongoing action and/or by projecting and eventually carrying out a relevant next action (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2005: 240). In a nutshell, “for genuine participation to take place, it needs at least two parties that incrementally build action together [… ] while both attending to, and helping to construct relevant action and context” (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2005: 240).

Children’s experience of own active participation emerges as a co-construction in interactions with coparticipants (Ekberg et al., 2022) and has been shown to have a positive effect on learning (Baker et al., 2021). Caregivers can encourage or frustrate their children’s initiatives (Antaki & Crompton, 2015) and negotiate who is in control and when. Children can thus experience more or less agency (Bednarski et al., 2022). Especially in early childhood, caregivers have the responsibility of helping to construct relevant action by offering forms of assistance to the child which progressively learns to master the structure (or scripts), the timing (or sequentiality), and the (communicative) actions inherent to different joint activities. Assistance can be provided by the caregivers or recruited by the children. As Laakso has recently pointed out (Laakso, 2021), children from age 1 to age 5 acquire various formats for getting caregivers (or peers) to fulfil their requests. Learning to get “(m)others to do things” does not always follow the cardinal pattern request (move A); fulfilment, rejection, or deferment (move B); and, eventually, acknowledgment (move C) (Floyd et al., 2020). Rather, interactants’ methods of recruitment can be conceptualised as a continuum, “from explicit requests, to practices that elicit offers, to anticipations of need” (Kendrick & Drew, 2016: 1).

In recent years, CA has seen an increasing interest in longitudinal studies (see Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2021). Longitudinal CA aims to track the emergence and dynamics of interactional practices, expectations, and resources over time. The recurrent experience of interactional practices leads interactants to develop practices that will be used again in future comparable interaction contexts and may sediment into interaction patterns over time (Pfänder & Behrens, 2016; Behrens & Pfänder, 2022; Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2021: 133; Dreyer, 2022). In our contribution, we go beyond the description of various local interactional practices that are highly context-sensitive and look for practices that have become sedimented routines in the interactional history of mother-child dyads.

How do we approach the data? Mutual adjustments of bodily movements and/or linguistic utterances in the real time of face-to-face interaction have been conceptualised as synchronisation (Feldman, 2007), alignment (Pickering & Garrod, 2004, 2020), behavioural matching (Bernieri & Rosenthal, 1991), interpersonal coordination (Cornejo et al., 2017; cf. Deppermann & Schmitt, 2007), or resonance (Du Bois, 2014). This family of concepts has been studied extensively in various disciplines including cognitive sciences (Pickering & Garrod, 2004, 2020), cognitive linguistics (Brône & Zima, 2014), developmental psychology (Beebe et al., 2016; Feldman, 2007; Jaffe et al., 2001), workplace psychology (Tolins & Fox Tree, 2021), and psychotherapy research (Altmann et al., 2020). Across these fields, synchronisation has been found to enhance cooperative action (cf. Rasenberg et al., 2020; Rennung & Göritz, 2016; Scheidt, et al. 2021). As early as in 1999, M. Goodwin claimed that the mutual “adjustment of body and talk” (1999: 177) is a prerequisite for participation. Building on these findings, we hypothesise that synchronisation fosters the active participation in collaborative activities.

Within this theoretical framework of CA in a comparative and longitudinal perspective, we pursue two research questions, one related to the comparison across caregiver-child dyads and one related to the development within each individual dyad.

In a comparative perspective, our first research question is whether the children’s weak and repeatedly interrupted orientation towards participation vs. constant and flow-like participation turn out to be related to how consistently the interactants are synchronised. In other words, our working hypothesis is that children’s weak or strong orientation towards participation is correlated with how consistently the interactants are “in sync at each step” (Enfield, 2017: 171).

In a longitudinal perspective, our second research question is whether the specific (i.e. rather weak or rather strong) participation patterns emerge as early as in the first year. That is, we ask whether the practices of more or less constant orientation towards active participation turn out be quite stable at the different ages within the dyads.

In a nutshell, taking both research perspectives together, we aim at exploring the question of whether children’s experiences of agentive participation are co-constructed by them and their caregivers and then sediments over time.

Data and method

For this study, we chose a corpus of video recordings of 64 mother-child dyads in play interaction, recorded within the TransGen project at Ulm University Hospital (Köhler-Dauner et al., 2019; Roder et al., 2020, Buchheim et al. 2022) from 2017 to 2022 and transcribed using the GAT 2 conventions (Selting et al., 2009).

So far, these data have almost exclusively been analysed using quantitative approaches, measuring mainly physiological data in order to investigate transgenerational effects of trauma and maltreatment (Brunner et al., 2015, George & West, 2012, Köhler-Dauner et al., 2019; Buchheim et al., 2022). To our knowledge, only few qualitative, interactional studies on these data have been published (Mandel 2023a).

  1. (i)

    Mandel (2023b) is the first conversation analytic study using these data; the author investigated which communicative functions polyphony has and how it involves the body. He found that animated speech serves to activate the child’s responsiveness, which is locally involved in the play and interaction with the mother. By using animated speech, mothers impart knowledge, deal with situational comprehension problems, and create moments of free play that they develop together with their children. Mandel’s multimodal analysis shows that beyond the vocal expressions, silent bodily displays make a decisive contribution to the situational organisation of the togetherness and cooperation between mother and child, too.

  2. (ii)

    In a follow-up study, Klatt (2024, to appear) used the same conversation analytic framework in order to disentangle whether within a presupposed participation framework of play-interaction, non-consent (i.e. saying “no”) allows the children to position themselves in the interaction and at the same time show their orientation towards active participation. The different forms of non-consent relate to different levels of interaction (on the micro-level of local actions or on the macro-level of the entire play-activity) and allow the child to reject all or part of the caregivers’ recruitment. Although non-consent is often considered an unfavoured move in interaction studies, the author shows convincingly that non-consent can also take a co-operative form in adult-child play-interactions in as far as it fosters negotiation and, ultimately, a joint development of the emerging play-project.

For our study, we chose a sample of 64 dyads at two out of five recording times. At t1, children were aged about 1 year, and at t2 about 5 years. We selected two semi-structured play sessions from these recordings, which took place in the homes of the participants. Mothers and children played together in the living room and were guided by instructions from two investigators who remained in the background while the tasks were being performed.

At both time points, the toys were brought along by the experiment leaders and are thus new for the children and mothers. However, while the one-year-old children were free to look at a book together or to build a tower with blocks, etc., the five-year-old children were instructed to play with a baby doll. This play activity is part of the “cry-baby paradigm” using the RealCare Baby© infant simulator, where a life-like doll has to be taken care of (changing diapers, soothing after crying, etc.). Here, the child has to recruit the assistance of the mother to secure the physical and emotional well-being of the baby doll. This paradigm has been used in several developmental studies (e.g. Bakermans-Kranenburg et al. 2015).

In the data sample under investigation, across the 64 dyads we chose, we found differing degrees of child participation in the joint play activities. For the design of this study, we contrasted the diverging degrees of orientation towards active participation.

In order to allow for a comparative perspective across dyads and a longitudinal perspective within one dyad, we narrow our focus down: we analyse how mothers synchronise with their children’s emergent expressions of need for assistance. We focus on moments when the children wish to upgrade or downgrade their participation in the ongoing joint action, i.e. when they do or do not display an orientation towards participation.

In order to operationalise the comparative approach, we chose four synchronisation parameters which allow for a rich and methodologically coherent sequential analysis and comparison of the two cases being investigated. These parameters are as follows:

  1. (1)

    Facing formation. The facing formation (or f-formation for short, cf. Kendon, 1990) is about the static or dynamic adjustment of the participants’ bodies towards each other (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2005). The f-formation shapes the affordances of manual and perceptual access to both the relevant play objects and the ongoing and projected actions of the coparticipants (Kendon, 2004; C. Goodwin, 2007: 58). In terms of dynamic f-formations, realignments of bodily positions may encourage or demand participation through renewed mutual orientation (Heath, 1984), while social touch can facilitate the understanding of what the other participant is inclined to do next (Cekaite & Mondada, 2020).

  2. (2)

    Joint attention. The dynamic synchronisation regarding the interactant’s f-formation is often though not always correlated with the attention towards or the monitoring of the other participant’s actions (Deppermann, 2014; Deppermann et al., 2021). Joint attention (Fiebich & Gallagher, 2013; Tomasello 1995) can be established and displayed through gazing, i.e. gaze following, and eventually eye contact (Holmlund, 1995; Kidwell, 2005; Kidwell & Zimmermann, 2007). Note that joint attention allows a participant to keep up not only with what the other participant is currently doing but also what s/he perceives, cf. Luhmann’s concept of Wahrnehmungswahrnehmung (i.e. perceived perception; Hausendorf, 2010; Stukenbrock, 2020).

  3. (3)

    Action alignment addresses an aspect of turn organisation between co-acting participants (Schegloff, 2007; Steensig, 2013; Stivers, 2008, 2012). When aligning, participants react to the preceding turn by responding promptly and adequately to a question or to a recruitment to help or by continuing and eventually completing an action initiated by their co-participant (Ehmer & Mandel 2021; Filipi, 2009: 45; Stivers et al., 2011).Footnote 1

  4. (4)

    Affective stancetaking. The parameters (1) and (2) above are clear instances of bodily synchronisation which facilitate action alignment (3). All three parameters, if put into action, make it easier for the mother to perceive the emotional displays of her child at any given moment. While alignment refers to the unfolding actions, affiliation refers to the content and more specifically to taking stances towards the prior action, supporting and/or affectively evaluating what has been said or done just before (Drew & Walker, 2009; Lee & Tanaka, 2016; Kupetz, 2019).

These four synchronisation parameters are summarised in Table 1, below:

Table 1 Synchronisation parameters
Full size table

Analysing a sample of 64 dyads which we observed both at age 1 and at age 5, applying the four synchronisation parameters expounded above, we found different types of orientation towards participation:

  1. (a)

    Child only observes and follows mother’s instruction with eye gaze, not showing any will to participate actively in the ongoing activity;

  2. (b)

    Child wants to participate, but the mother only rarely allows for it, often alluding at her epistemic skills to fulfil the task that she judges to be too difficult for her child;

  3. (c)

    Child oscillates between initiatives of participation and withdrawal to be an observing bystander, soliciting their mother to perform all the play action; and

  4. (d)

    A dance of finely coordinated co-participation throughout the entire play activity.

As only the types (c) and (d) display active participation, though to rather differing degrees, we decided to showcase the results for longitudinal case studies for Marie and Lisa who represent each of these types (Lisa, type c, and Marie, type d). We will present the results of these two longitudinal case studies in the following chapter.

Results of our longitudinal case studies

In order to illustrate our results, we first showcase prototypical participation patterns in the play-interaction between Marie and her mother at age 1 (“Marie age 1” section) and at age 5 (“Marie age 5” section); then Lisa aged 1 and 5 (“Lisa age 1” section and “Lisa age 5” section, respectively). Lisa’s interactions present a case of weak orientations towards active participation; Marie on the other hand is strongly oriented towards participation from age 1 onwards.

Marie age 1

In the first dyad, the mother and her daughter Marie, one-year-old at the time of this recording, are looking at a children’s book together. The book contains pictorial parts and tactile elements; in particular, there are typographic images of animals (such as sheep, geese, and cats).

At the beginning, Marie and her mother are in a sitting position with their legs spread directly behind each other; Marie is leaning against her mother’s stomach and holding the book in her hands. The excerpt on which we want to focus is the moment in which both participants look at a page on which both a cow and a fly are depicted:

05 MOT: und da isch die KUH;

       and there‘s the cow

06 M:::uh::

   mooo

07 und da is die Fliege ssss::::[#1]

   and there‘s the fly ssss::::

08 (1.5)

09 MAR: AH[#2] eh

10 MOT: no_mal?

        again?

11 SSSSSSSSS:::ut?

   SSSSSSSSS::: ut

12 (1.3)

13 MOT: SSSSSSSSS::: chup ((laughs))

        SSSSSSSSS::: chup ((laughs))

14 <<laughing> (xxx)>

<< laughing> (xxx)>

15 no_mal;

   again

16 SSSSSSSSS::: (0.8)

   SSSSSSSSS:::

The mother repeatedly verbalises the name of the animal Marie has chosen (05, 07). This “introduction” or first naming is accompanied by typical and onomatopoeic animal sounds (06, 07). Thus, the mother explicitly names the corresponding object and playfully sets an attention focus with the vocalisation (Matthews, 2014) and creates a certain rhythmicity and predictability, which facilitates the anticipation and thus the participation of the child. Similarly, each time she names the fly with a voiced ssss:::: (07, 11, 13, 16), the mother iconises an imagined (flight) movement, starting from where the fly is pictured in the book (cf. Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

The mother iconises an imagined (flight) movement, starting from where the fly is pictured in the book

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The focus of attention is a joint one: Marie and her mother are looking together at the book and at the imaginary flight movement of the fly, respectively. After the execution of this movement phase, Marie reaches for her mother’s right index finger with her right hand and pulls it towards herself (cf. Fig. 2). Marie’s mother understands that her daughter wants her to carry out the flight movement again (10), this time together. The fly does not remain a static object but is raised to a multisensory level: it becomes visible through imagined movement, audible through vocalisation, and—through the touch in this context—also tangible, in each repetition landing on Marie’s nose.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Marie reaches for her mother’s right index finger with her right hand and pulls it towards herself

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The joint game is ratified insofar as the imitation of the fly is taken up two more times (13, 16) and framed with a joint laughter in each case (13, 14). In an emergent way, a joint production of meaning takes place: not only is a connection between the cow and the fly established but also the fly, which is buzzing around, lands on Marie’s nose—the mental space (in the book) and the real space (in the here-and-now) thus overlap and are expanded into a complex scene (cf. Haviland, 2010; Liddell, 2000; Ehmer, 2011).

In sum, Marie’s mother not only recognises her daughter’s initiative (the grasping her index finger) but also, together with her daughter, develops it further (the joint imitation of the fly). Picking up on, going along with, and shaping Marie’s initiative plays a central role in this. Furthermore, mother and child not only share actions but also emotions which can “facilitate coordination without presupposing common knowledge of complex, interconnected structures of intentions” (Michael, 2011: 355).

Marie age 5

Marie is now five and a half years old. She and her mother are presented with a baby doll named Leo. One of the experiment leaders addresses Marie as the potential main agent of the activity ahead: I have brought you someone. Look, it’s Leo. Leo was asleep until just now. Would you change his diaper and play with him a little? Your mother may help you.

With this introduction, which is accompanied by the handing over of the baby doll as well as a diaper bag, a play and interaction sequence opens up. Prior to the transcript excerpts reproduced here, Marie and her mother have collaboratively and successfully diapered Leo (i.e. opened the pants, removed the old diaper, attached the new diaper, and put the pants back on). We noticed Marie took initiative and her mother assisted.

The first set task is therefore actually finished, but Marie—still strongly anchored in the imagined play situation—now looks for food for Leo in the diaper bag. Marie’s mother responds by saying that Leo needs to be breastfed. Both then re-arrange their bodies to find a vis-à-vis sitting position to start a longer negotiation sequence about who shall breastfeed Leo:

05 MAR: DU musst ihn stillen;

       you have to breastfeed him

06 (0.5)

07 MAR: musst DU machen;

        You have to do it

08 (0.6)

09 MOT: ah ICH muss ihn stillen;=

        ah I have to breastfeed him

10 =ja BIN nicht die pUppenmama-=

    ah am not the doll’s mom

11 =DU bist doch die pUppenmama;

    you are the doll’s mom

12 MAR: =nEIn DU;#3

         no you

13 (0.3)

14 MOT: ah jetzt bin ICH-=

        ah now I am

15 MAR: =jetzt DU-

         now you

16 MOT: mh:: a:lso dann TRINK mAl-

        mh so then now you drink

Marie projects the next action by attributing agency to her mother (05): YOU have to breastfeed him. By uttering a parallel syntactic resonance format ah I have to breastfeed him (09), her mother marks that she has perceived and understood the recruitment—and also that she will continue to participate in the further development of the imagined play world. Before temporarily carrying out the action of breastfeeding, though, she negotiates her participation, reminding Marie of her role as doll’s mom (10–11), encouraging her that she has the necessary expertise and entitlement for this. However, this is not to be interpreted as a rejection but rather as a playful negotiation of roles within the play situation.

Solicited by Marie’s renewed and also bodily executed insistence (12, Fig. 3), the mother then accepts the role attributed to her (14) and carries out the projected next action of taking the baby doll in her arms. She addresses the doll as if it were a living baby: Mh so then now you drink (16).

Fig. 3
figure 3

The mother accepts the role attributed to her

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17 MOT: (0.5) so jetzt [ist_er ] RUhig;=

Okay now he is quiet

18 MAR: [((bumpy laughter)) ]

19 MOT: =!KANNST! du des nicht,

can't you do that?

20 [STIL]len;

breastfeed

21 MAR: [JA ]

YES

22 MOT: (0.4) mAchst doch bei deiner puppe AUCH immer;

You always do that with your doll too

23 na bist DU dran jetzt;

well it’s your turn now

24 ah jetzt [DU; ]#4.

Ah, now you

25 MAR: [<<p, ☺ > OKEE>]

okay

26 MAR: ((laughs))

(0.6)

27 MOT: ((soft laughter))

After referring to Marie’s prior knowledge or expertise and thus encouraging her (22), the mother now returns the breastfeeding action order, previously delegated by her daughter, back to Marie (well it’s your turn now | ah, now you, now YOU, 23-24, Fig. 4)—in a very similar form as Marie had done before (12, 15).

Fig. 4
figure 4

Mother now returns the breastfeeding action order, previously delegated by her daughter, back to Marie

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And once again, the expected or preferred next action is redeemed, because Marie smiles and utters OKAY and takes Leo in her arms and laughs (25). The preceding breastfeeding of the mother thus appears as showing on the model, which Marie can orient herself to and synchronise with.

30 MOT: ah (.) n bisschen HOCH-

ah up a bit

31 MAR: ((strained)) ehh-

ehh

32 MOT: ((imitating)) ahh-

ahh

Marie is not left alone with the challenging task. The short instruction (up a bit, 30) is taken up by Marie, who onomatopoetically displays the successful effort she puts into adjusting the doll (31). Her mother affiliates with Marie empathetically by echoing the sound her daughter made (32).

Lisa age 1

Mother and child (Lisa, 1 year and 2 months old) are sitting together on the carpet at home in the living room with various big LEGO bricks and figures in front of them.

The mother has just begun to build a tower when Lisa grabs a figure and accompanies this with the vocalisation there (01).

01 LIS: DA,

      there

02 MOT: (0.4) DA? #5

              there?

03 (1.4)

04 LIS: äh-

05 (2.0)

06 MOT: h° he #6

07 (0.7)

08 MOT: <<creaky> oah::>;

09 fÄhrt der mit dem AUto?

   does he drive the car ?

10 wo fährt der mit dem AUto hin;

   where is he going with the car

11 (1.8)

12 MOT: daREIN?

        in there?

13 (0.4) <<h> hu->

14 MOT: guck ich kriegs AUCH nich hin; #7

        look I can’t get it right either

By echoing there, the mother signals that she has heard the child (02) but remains busy with her own project without making eye contact with the child (Fig. 5). The child first observes the mother and eventually places the figure elsewhere (Fig. 6). The mother remains engaged in her own project (building a tower) but comments on the child’s action again does he drive the car? / where is he going with the car? (08–10), and again without looking at her.

Fig. 5
figure 5

The mother signals that she has heard the child but remains busy with her own project without making eye contact with the child

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Fig. 6
figure 6

The child first observes the mother and eventually places the figure elsewhere

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While the mother is speaking, Lisa reorients herself to what the mother is doing by means of gaze direction and offers the figure again (without speaking, 11). The mother verbalises the child’s initiative again here: in there? (12). But even at this point, she does not align with her daughter’s action projection and thus does not actively involve her child in the game. Instead, she regrets that the completion of the tower is not successful: look I can’t get it right either (13–14) and puts the tower on the floor which prevents Lisa from placing the figure. Lisa then leans back, the piece still in her hand, giving up her initiatives to participate (cf. Fig. 7) and falls back to an observer’s position.

Fig. 7
figure 7

Lisa then leans back, the piece still in her hand, giving up her initiatives to participate

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A little later, the mother has almost finished building the tower, when Lisa draws attention to herself with yet another initiative and holds out a cow to the mother (21).

21 LIS: DA-

     there

22 MOT: (0.6) die KUH_U?

              the cow?

23 (0.4 ((clearing throat))

24 (0.3)#8 (2.0)

25 MOT: fEhlt noch eins;

        one is missing

26 ((sniffs)) (0.3) wArte is SCHIEF-#9

                    wait is crooked

27 HOPPsala;

   whoopsy

28 (1.2)

Again, the mother verbally responds to this initiative: the cow? (22) and now also places the tower in front of the child. Just as Lisa is about to put the cow into the wagon on top of the tower (Fig. 8), the mother notices that one brick is still missing on one side of the tower. She asks the child to wait with her initiative until she herself has added a missing building block: one is missing / wait is crooked (25–26) so that the tower stands securely.

Fig. 8
figure 8

Mother notices that one brick is still missing on one side of the tower

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Again, she does not make eye contact with her child. In order to add the missing brick, she turns the tower in such a way that the figure that the child had already put in falls out (Fig. 9). The mother also notices this and comments on it by saying whoopsy (27).

Fig. 9
figure 9

Mother turns the tower in such a way that the figure that the child had already put in falls out

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In this free play situation, Lisa offers initiatives several times, which the mother definitely notices and explicitly comments on verbally, thus displaying a certain amount of empathy (e.g. whoopsy, 27). However, she hardly establishes eye contact with the child but continues with her own action project. That means she does neither facilitate Lisa’s activity nor accept the proposed interactional role. Thus, despite several verbal and non-verbal initiatives, it is not possible for the child to actively influence the course of the action, although the mother has recognised her intentions.

Lisa age 5

Lisa (5 years and 10 months) and her mother are again in the living room at home. However, unlike the home visit in t1, this time it is not a free play situation, but they have to carry out the same caregiving task that has been explained in the previous example with Marie (cf. Marie age 5).

As in Marie’s case, one of the experiment leaders opens with the play frame according to which Leo has just woken up with a full nappy. This scenario is again concluded with an instruction addressed directly to Lisa: I want you to change Leo’s nappy with your mummy, and when you have changed it, you may also play with Leo. Based on this explanation of the participation framework, Lisa (as Marie in the example before) is addressed as an actively participating agent.

The excerpt analysed here starts when Lisa and her mother have changed Leo’s diaper and finished dressing him; just before the onset of the sequence now to be analysed, Lisa noticed a small bottle of milk in the diaper bag; her attention is so focused on the bottle, so that she does not pay attention to her mother putting Leo’s trousers back on. Lisa’s mother perceives her daughter handling the bottle and recruits her daughter for a next possible action:

02 MOT: gIbsch ihm was zu TRINKen;=

       you give him something to drink

03 LIS: =NÖ (.) dU;

        nö, you

04 (0.3)

05 MOT: <<f>ICH:->

            me?

06          Oah;

07 (0.7)

08 LIS: du HÄLTST#10 ihn-

        you hold him

09 (0.5)

10 MOT: und du GIBST (sie) ihm;

        and you give (it) to him

11 LIS:((nodding))

However, this recruitment is rejected by Lisa and referred back to the mother (nope, you, 03). The mother reacts to this with a response cry (oah; 06, cf. Goffman, 1978), indicating an affective stance of annoyance. Lisa insists on recruiting her mother to feed Leo by bending her body forward and by another directive (you hold him, 08, Fig. 10), which is delivered with an insisting prosody.

Fig. 10
figure 10

Lisa insists on recruiting her mother to feed Leo by bending her body forward

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Subsequently, the mother tries to re-engage Lisa by means of the syntactic expansion and you give (it) to him (10). However, in this moment of assigning agency to her daughter, the mother does neither turn nor look at her daughter. Lisa nods in response and agrees with this division of participation roles. This is where the second part of the sequence starts:

13 MOT: ALso;

       so

14 (1.0)

15 MOT: <<f>SO->

16 (0.9)

17 LIS: ICH (.) ma:g nicht;=

        I don’t want to

18 MOT: =hm (.) Oah <<creaky> #11LI::sa::->

        hm… oah Lisa

19 (2.6)

20 MOT: und JETZT-

        and now?

21 (5.7)

22 MOT: FERtig;

        done

23 ((closing the bottle with the cap))

24 MOT: oKEE.

        okay

The previously negotiated distribution of participation roles (the mother holds Leo, Lisa gives Leo something to drink), which Lisa initially confirmed (11), is acted out by her mother, but not by Lisa (I don’t want to, 17). The mother then does the feeding without her daughter’s participation. This is followed by a renewed affective stance of the mother, again displaying annoyance, this time addressing her daughter by name (oah Lisa, 18) without aiming at direct eye contact (Fig. 11).

Fig. 11
figure 11

Mother does the feeding without her daughter’s participation

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By naming or direct personal reference, the mother thus resorts to a context-contingent linguistic resource of social action (cf. De Stefani, 2009, 2012, 2016; De Stefani & Pepin, 2006; Günthner, 2021), thus further reinforcing the already expressed display of annoyance.

What is striking in Lisa’s dyad (if compared with Marie’s dyad) is that Lisa’s emotional stances are not matched by her mother. The joy of discovery is only commented on verbally but does not become shared joy, and the child’s expression of trouble with a task is not emotionally shared but reacted to with disappointment or anger. While the mother does perceive a number of her child’s initiatives, she does not encourage or support the child in trying to propose its own course of action but rather follows her own plan of action impatiently. Achieving the individual goal is prioritised over the process of doing something together.

These observations are very stable in the first and fifth year of life. Participation is not encouraged and the repeated experience that one’s own initiatives are not taken up, supported, and developed leads to the child’s own initiatives becoming less and less frequent. At age 5, Lisa pursues her own goals of action and delegates the main action to her mother.

Conclusion: does synchronisation foster children’s active participation play-interactions?

Participation in joint activities is a pervasive form of human sociality. In this contribution, we focus on how children perform their own agentive participant’s work and how mothers may support their children in doing so. Investigating a longitudinal data set of mother-child play-interactions at age 1 and 5, we found that the children’s display of active participation clearly differs across the dyads.

For this contribution, we chose to perform a longitudinal case study of two mother-child dyads. Both children display orientation towards participation. However, whereas one child (Lisa) sometimes takes initiatives, but at other times denies participation and chooses instead to just be an observing bystander, the other child (Marie) is in a flow-like state of always actively participating in the play-action, trying out her own agency at any time, even when facing emergent challenges. Wondering why that is, we tested the hypothesis that synchronisation facilitates participation. And indeed, in Marie’s dyad, the combination of the bodily arrangement, constant gaze following, and touch facilitates the mother’s alignment and affiliation with her daughter’s projected actions (Fig. 12).

Fig. 12
figure 12

F-Formation, Marie and her mother at age 1 (a) and at age 5 (b)

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In Lisa’s dyad, the lack of bodily synchronisations (turning their torsos away from each other, different gaze foci, no touch, Fig. 13) correlates with the lack of alignment and affiliation.

Fig. 13
figure 13

F-Formation, Lisa and her mother at age 1 (a), and at age 5 (b)

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The mutual adjustment of bodily positions, gaze following, and verbal and gestural resonance thus differ strikingly between the two dyads both at t1 (age 1) and t2 (age 5). We found that mothers are more successful in facilitating active participation when they synchronise with the child at different levels of interaction.

The four synchronisation parameters which turned out to correlate with strong vs. weak orientation towards participation are as follows:

  1. (1)

    Facing formation. In the dyad with weak orientation towards participation, both mother and child are often concerned with different objects and are thus facing these objects, but not necessarily the other participant. In the dyad with strong orientation towards participation, on the other hand, the interactants orient themselves dynamically to the object and to each other and constantly readjust their body posture in order to face both the play object and the partner at any given moment.

  2. (2)

    Joint attention. The dynamic synchronisation regarding the sitting position of the other person allows the mother to look directly at the child at any time. The same applies to the child, who can gaze directly at its mother. This allows them to be attentive, without interruption, to what the other person is perceiving, planning to do, actually doing, or feeling (for example, the joy of successfully completing an action or the annoyance when facing challenges in carrying out a job). In contrast, when caregivers and children experience a number of breaks in the flow of joint attention, opportunities for participating in the ongoing action will be missed, resulting in a rather weak degree of participation by the partners.

  3. (3)

    Action alignment. The constant monitoring allows the mothers and children to be aware of the respective action progression at any moment. The mother can therefore facilitate and support the child’s initiatives and recruitments for help or comfort. Equally, the child is able to continue with the next possible step in a complex activity as s/he is always aware of all action progression and possible transactions between action phases. In the dyads with weak participation, however, the uptake of projected next action, i.e. interactional alignment, is repeatedly missing. This finding is interdependent with the observation above concerning degrees of “joint attention”: if the mutual monitoring is repeatedly interrupted, action alignment is quite challenging for interactants.

  4. (4)

    Affective stancetaking. Whereas the above-mentioned parameters (1) and (2) are clear instances of bodily synchronisation which facilitate action alignment (3), both the dynamic adjustment of the participants bodies towards each other and the play object as well as the constant mutual monitoring also make it easier for the mother to perceive the emotional displays of her child at any given moment. Affective stancetaking becomes possible, the mother can share joy or show empathy with the displayed feeling of difficulty in challenging moments.

In a longitudinal perspective, all of the above observations are true for the first and fifth year of life.

In a comparative perspective, thus, the children’s weak and repeatedly interrupted orientation towards participation vs. strong and flow-like participation turn out to be related to how consistently the interactants are synchronised. That is to say, how mothers align to their children’s action initiatives and affiliate with their displays of emotion and how they monitor their children and adjust their spatial orientation to what their children are currently doing.

In a longitudinal perspective, the comparison of the two prototypical dyads revealed that (a) participation patterns emerge as early as in the first year and that (b) synchronisation facilitates the active participation of both participants in the joint activity in t1 (age 1) and in t2 (age 5). We thus found clear evidence that from an interactional perspective, children’s experiences of agentive participation are co-constructed by them and their caregivers.

Discussion

From early on, children can both start actions and initiate projects, as well as follow up and build on projects initiated by others. However, this requires a shared perception by both participants. The success of the individual actions is less dependent on the assessment, i.e. whether something is described as completed, but rather on the extent to which both participants gradually build, develop, and carry out the individual actions together.

Caregivers can encourage their children to actively participate in joint actions, by accompanying them step by step. If the child initiates a project, their mother can support this initiation and “go along with it”. The children then feel confirmed that they are doing something that is recognised as a legitimate action step, and that their actions are taken up in further actions and thus become part of the joint action. Based on these results, we can now draw conclusions regarding how children learn to participate. Children learn to participate when they can take initiative in their actions and/or are actively supported in their own initiatives.

Our results allow for a further development of our theoretical conversation analytic framework. According to Goodwin and Goodwin (2005), participation is to be understood as “a domain of temporally unfolding embodied action through which multiple participants build in concert with each other the events that constitute their lifeworld” (2005: 223). This concept must now be expanded to include a longitudinal, developmental view. When comparing the age groups, it seems remarkable that children aged 1 are not yet able to participate on a play level, or only to a limited extent, depending on the mother’s behaviour. The fact that children can take on a participation role at the age of 5 shows that in the meantime:

  1. (a)

    Learning has taken place, namely from in situ participation in the real world of the “real of the interaction”, to participation in the imagined dimension of the play, the “narrated world”.

  2. (b)

    This learning can be traced back to the behaviour of the participants (i.e. mother AND child) in the accomplished reality (and other multiparty interactions elsewhere).

  3. (c)

    This learning can be supported by mothers giving their children a detailed orientation in the respective interaction, making clear on which levels the other person is currently acting. In this way, these levels and the associated participation roles can be negotiated.

We can therefore conclude that when mothers play with children aged 1 and accompany them step by step, the children acquire knowledge of how participation works on different levels as they grow up. Due to this, they can then actively take up this knowledge in later interactions in their lives. Thus, from an educational perspective, we conclude that caregivers can enhance their children’s ability to actively participate in joint projects through being “in sync” with them at each step of the unfolding interaction. As the synchronisation parameters tested here turn out to disentangle the different participation practices in the two cases under scrutiny, they seem appropriate as a model for larger scale and quantitative research.