“But please can I play with the iPad?”: The development of request negotiation practices by a four-year-old child

This paper presents a longitudinal study of a four-year-old child's development of the interactional practices to negotiate requests when immediate granting from the parents was not given. While many studies have focused on the development of requesting abilities by children and some have shed light on their request negotiation practices, little is currently known about how children develop the interactional practices to pursue requests in extended discourse. Using conversation analysis to track a child's request negotiation practices for twelve months, we demonstrate that over time, the child learned to occasion, formulate, and reformulate requests in ways that exhibited increased sensitivity to the recipient and the sequential context as well as to his own entitlement and the request's contingency. The findings contribute to research on child language socialization by highlighting the active role children may play in co-constructing interaction and thus shaping the trajectory of socialization.