May I have your attention, please?

Image by BreckenPool via Flickr

A clearing of the throat will usually do it. In the old days, they would prefix a comment with something like 'I say,...' (these days, it is more likely to be a slackerishly inflected 'Hey,...'). A basic rule of conversation is that you don't start imparting your wisdom until you know you have got the attention of the intended recipient. Unless you've prepared the ground in this way, your words are likely to fall on deaf ears.

When do children learn about this essential convention?

It must have a lot to do with their developing understanding of how attention works. Anyone who has spent time with a toddler will know that they will just launch into a conversation with little concern for whether their audience can keep up. Those early dialogues are full of attempts, on the part of the adult, to establish exactly what the topic of conversation has changed to now. Indeed, Piaget's explanation of the phenomenon of private speech (speech that doesn't seem to be addressed to anyone except the self) was that children were attempting to communicate without doing enough to adapt their utterances to the perspective of the listener. They weren't, he argued, doing enough to line up their own way of thinking with that of the person within earshot. (I'll be writing some more on this topic in a later post.)

At five, Isaac has a good grip of this convention, although perhaps an unconventional way of following it. When he wants to make a point or attract someone's attention, he makes a sharp quacking sound, blowing a raspberry through his clenched fist like you might do if you wanted to mimic Donald Duck. It's loud, striking and effective. It stops us in our tracks. It's his call for social attention, and it works. How I'll miss it when it turns to throat-clearing, a teenagerish sigh, or whatever the latest slangy bid for attention might involve.