ABSTRACT
It seems that as participants in social interaction, children under 7 can be far more adept comunicatively and socially than they get credit for.1 We base this claim on having attended to a key aspect of social interaction: persons’ achievement of social goals depends (in certain circumstances2) on their fashioning interactional turns proactively, not just reactively, i.e., in anticipation of and for the sake of their consequences for the course of the interaction. We do not refer here to children’s adaptations of talk and behavior based on social cognitions about the other’s competence, needs, dispositions, or the like. Our interest is whether, and in what ways, children adapt talk and behavior so as to constrain what can relevantly, coherently, be included in the interaction regardless of who the other is, on the basis of ‘knowledge’ about the formal interconnections among components of social interactions. The proactive aspects of children’s participation in peer interactions in this sense has not been taken into account, or at least seriously examined, in most work on children’s communicative and social development.
