Constructing self and other: A language socialization approach to Latina mother-child conflict talk

The present study examines how linguistic features (speech acts, semantics, forms) of conflict talk contribute to caregivers' and children's constructions of self and other. Unlike developmental perspectives that focus on self as a representational or cognitive construct, self is considered here as a socially and linguistically emergent phenomenon.; In order to characterize how caregivers and children use justifications and directives as positioning devices in conflict episodes, their proportional use and the use of variations in semantic person reference and in person forms were analyzed. Linguistic variations were further analyzed in their interactive contexts in order to determine their interactive functions. Nine caregiver-child (aged 3;6 to 4;3) dyads of Mexican heritage were video- and audio-taped for 3 hours in their homes doing everyday activities such as eating, cleaning, and playing. Conflict episodes were transcribed and utterances were coded along four dimensions: (1) speaker: caregiver, child, other; (2) speech act: justification, directive, other; (3) semantic person reference: self, addressee, none/other, and (4) person form: the specific person form, if any, was noted for each utterance. Caregivers' and children's proportional use of justifications was found to be similar, while caregivers used more directives than children.; Caregivers made proportionately fewer self and more addressee references than children with both speech acts, while children were found to use a greater proportion of self references with justifications than with directives. Caregivers used fewer explicit person forms and more null and reflexive forms with both speech acts, while children used proportionately more explicit forms (e.g., subject pronouns) in both contexts. Some differences in the use of person forms were also observed as a function of speech act, and children were found to use some forms for different discursive purposes than caregivers.; While children's use of justifications and directives has been treated as an indicator of social perspective-taking ability, the present findings suggest that their use serves a much wider range of communicative and positioning functions and that speech act, semantic, and formal features of language all figure in the construction of personhood in ways that are more varied and more subtle that prior research has indicated.