“Observability” in the Interactions of Very Young ChildrenThis paper is based on a portion of the first author's dissertation research, which was directed by the second author, and which received the 2004 Distinguished Dissertation Award from the Division of Language and Social Interaction at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association in Chicago, IL. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 2002 International Conference on Conversation Analysis in Copenhagen, Denmark.

This paper demonstrates how children aged 1–2½ years monitor the attentional focus of their caregivers in situations of their sanctionable acts toward a peer (e.g., pushing) and organize their conduct to evade, or alternately draw, a caregiver's attention to these events. A large literature in the psychological sciences documents a number of attention organizing behaviors that emerge in children's first 2 years, and links these behaviors to children's early understandings of intentionality. We propose, however, that children's orientations to their caregivers, and whether or not they will intervene, derive from their abilities to assess a range of “real world” contingences having to do with the fundamental observability of their conduct, that is, with whether or not, and how, a caregiver comes to see their activities. Our investigation concerns the communication resources that enable children to “read” the conduct of others, and position their own actions by reference to the actions of others, in strategic ways.