The use of justifications in the linguistic construction of agency and social connection in Latina mother–child conflict

•In conflicts, preschoolers and mothers use justifications with similar frequency.•Mothers justify directives to children; children justify refusals to mothers.•Mothers and children both reference the child more frequently than the mother.•Mothers and children use “self” forms similarly and “other” forms differently.•Self-assertion, interpersonal connections are indexed in child-centered conflicts.

The current study investigates the linguistic construction of self and other through use of justifications by Mexican heritage preschoolers and their mothers. Justifications occurring in spontaneous conflicts of 9 mother–child dyads are analyzed in terms of speech act context (i.e. justifying refusals, justifying directives) and use of self- and other-references. Mothers most often justify their directives to their children, while children most often justify their refusals to their mothers. While children and mothers use self-reference forms similarly, children refer to their mothers infrequently and use very few other-reference forms, while mothers make more frequent and varied use of other-reference forms. These results show that the use of justifications by these Spanish-speaking mothers and their preschoolers play a complex role in the construction of agency and social connection in their conflicts with one another. They contribute to the construction of a child-centered discourse while at the same time indicating that the children are well on their way to developing a pragmatic orientation to communicative interactions with their mothers.