Conversation analysis (CA) has become a key approach in early childhood studies, offering deep insights into children’s interactions across a variety of settings. Sacks’s early lectures demonstrated a keen interest in children’s lives and how they competently organize social worlds in an adult-governed world, sparking a growing prevalence of the study of infants, toddlers, and young children through a CA approach. This chapter aims to capture key messages from CA early childhood studies, with a focus on (1) the social competence of infants, toddlers, and young children; (2) morality and socialization in adult-child and children’s peer interactions; and (3) pedagogy and learning-in-interaction. The chapter concludes with suggested readings and a discussion of future directions, emphasizing practical applications and further research to advance CA in early childhood studies.

Child pragmatic development involves children's acquisition of communicative competences, that is, learning how to use language, in order to understand and communicate with others appropriately in an expanding range of social contexts. The aim of this entry is to describe the main research perspectives on child pragmatic development, introduce the areas and methods of their inquiry, and review their findings. The entry discusses research on children's speech acts, conversational skills, politeness and social parameters of language use, and extended discourse genres such as narratives, explanations, arguments, and conflict talk.

Participation is central to the organization of social interaction, in particular for shaping the contributions of diverse parties to the ongoing activity as well as the options they have to contribute to it. This chapter discusses different ways in which the notion of participation is used in conversation analysis (CA), and how it addresses a diversity of conceptual and analytical issues. This chapter first presents some conceptual issues and then discusses methodological challenges raised by the documentation of participation in video recordings and transcriptions. Next, it elaborates on how participation relates to key phenomena in multimodal CA, such as turn-taking, interactional space, haptic sociality, and multi-activity, relying both on the literature and on empirical illustrations. In conclusion, some future directions for research on participation are outlined.

This study explores preschool teachers’ perspectives on child-initiated touch in early childhood educational settings in Sweden. Touch is an inevitable and integral part of everyday life in early childhood, where it is important for development, care, and the formation of trusting social relationships. While prior research has predominantly examined adult–child touch, limited attention has been given to teachers’ perspectives on child-initiated touch. This study uses an elicitation interview method aiming to examine preschool teachers’ notions concerning the functions and purposes served by child–educator and children’s peer group touch episodes in preschools in Sweden. The data consist of interviews with 15 educators, analyzed using thematic discourse analysis. The findings show that children’s touch is seen as a flexible tool used to communicate different needs, establish independence, set boundaries, and affirm social relations.

This chapter describes multimodal and multisensorial practices for interacting with, caring for, and socializing children in various cultural communities worldwide. It outlines multisensorial socialization processes, focusing on how touch is used, together with other modalities, in adults’ responses to children’s distress across different communities and age groups. Socializing potentials of these practices regarding emotion and moral personhood, the child’s autonomy, and peer-group relations are discussed, as well as culturally specific forms of change during childhood. Infants and young children become members of their community as they are interacted with and socialized not only as verbal, but also as embodied subjects whose verbal and bodily actions, emotions, and moral conduct are monitored, corrected, and shaped by adults in normatively relevant ways that change throughout the child’s development. Adults’ responses to children’s crying provide a fruitful resource for uncovering the sociocultural assumptions of how to perform actions, express emotions, and maintain relationships.

The study examines young children’s peer group interactions characterized by creative language use. We operationalize the concept of everyday poetics to explore the forms, heteroglossic resources, and the social and aesthetic purposes of children’s peer encounters. The data consists of video ethnography conduced in a bilingual Swedish-English preschool for children aged 1–5 in Sweden. Using multimodal conversation analysis, the study shows that everyday poetics involved young bilinguals engaging in aesthetic, exploratory talk through sound and meaning associations, category explorations, and cross-speaker sound and word play in both institutional languages. Children’s language play served multiple purposes beyond the social relationality of the peer group. Children employed heteroglossia in aesthetic performances and language teaching, which became integral parts of social episodes that began as language play. The study argues that analytical attention to aesthetic and playful features of everyday interaction can contribute to our deeper understanding of human sociality.

Play is a social activity that takes many shapes and forms. It is researched from various perspectives that highlight its multiple functions and potentials. Play is strongly associated with children’s activities and childhood, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 31) states that play should have a central place in the life and education of children, as it is important for their development, learning and well-being. It also has a prominent position in early childhood education in Sweden, where the intrinsic value of play (including free play) is emphasized and acknowledged (Curriculum for the Preschool, Skolverket, 2019).

The present chapter outlines the development of video analysis as an analytical method within the fields of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The chapter describes the origins of video recording and presents some of the pioneers of data collection and data analysis (C. Goodwin, G. Jefferson, M. Goodwin, C. Heath, among others). The development of systematic analytical procedures of video-data is sketched out. Some of the classical and seminal analyses of multiparty participation, how gestures enter interactional meaning-making, and how storytelling is organised (e.g. C. Goodwin & M. Goodwin) are described. The development of video analysis through time as it is gaining central position in ethnomethodological and in CA studies is briefly outlined.