Family dinners grounded in commensality are a collective ritual that plays a key role in family members' cultural heritage (Ochs & Kremer-Sadlik, 2013). Those shared moments of everyday life present a perfect opportunity to study language practices in the framework of multiactivity (Haddington et al. 2014). Because the subtle interweaving of these practices while eating fully engages the body, this presentation will highlight the semiotic differences between children using a spoken language, French, and a sign language, Langue des Signes Française (LSF), at different ages. They are constraints that could be different for speaking and signing family members - using the mouth to eat and speak is problematic and it is not easy to cut meat or pour water and be an active addressee of a signer; but there are also possible multi-activities one learns to combine - chewing can be synchronous with actively listening and gazing at the speaker or signer. Family members deploy a multitude of skillful multimodal variations in the collective coordination of bodies, activities and artifacts.
In this study, we focus on the finely-tuned coordination and in situ organization of the joint activities of conversing and dining that fully engage the same body components (eyes, head, mouth, hands, arms). Our aim is to capture the multiple deployments of the embodied behaviors of dinner participants, and children's progressive socialization to multiactivity. We show how family members collaboratively manage the accomplishments of multiple streams of activity and coordinate their temporal organizations through the embodied performances of dining and interacting (Goodwin, 1984). Ethnographic methods were used to collect dinnertime data in two official languages of France characterized by their semiotic differences. We recorded dinners in middle-class families speaking French or signing in French sign language living in Paris with children between 3 and 12 years old. The families we video-recorded consist of two adults and two to three children. We use two standard cameras and one 360° camera to capture multiple angles and code our data in ELAN on independent tiers in which the use of participants' modalities are captured. Qualitative analyses were combined with quantitative methods.
Our analyses demonstrate that 1) because of the specialized role of gaze and of the articulators involved (mouth, hands, arms…), there are crucial differences between coordinating speaking vs. signing, and eating; 2) parents provide their children with feedback on how to coordinate the activities of eating vs. speaking or signing which helps 3) children become increasingly expert at coordinating semiotic resources and at navigating between activities.
Goodwin, C. (1984). Notes on story structure and the organization of participation, In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, J. Maxwell Atkinson, John Heritage, eds., London, Cambridge University Press, pp. 225–246.
Haddington, P., Keisanen, T., Mondada, L., Nevile, M. (2014). Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking, Amsterdam/Philadelphia : Benjamins.
Ochs, Elinor and Tamar Kremer–Sadlik (eds.). 2013. Fast–Forward Family. Home, Work, and Relationships in Middle–Class America. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
