'What's your cousin Arthur's mommy's name?': Features of family talk about kin and kin terms

Abstract

This paper examines conversations about kin terms and kin relations between one child and her family over a period of almost three years, when the child was aged 2;3 to 5;1. Transcripts of conversations in which kin members were explicitly discussed were coded for categories that distinguished progressive levels of children's knowledge of kin terms: identification statements and routines, characteristic features, and defining features. Throughout the period under study, talk about the characteristic features of kin members predominated, and included personal characteristics, the exchange of gifts, and the rights, responsibilities and rituals that bound family members. From ages four to five, some of these features were also applied more generally to kinship categories. Conversations that incorporated defining features were relatively infrequent, but appeared as early as age 2;10. Although only one child was observed, these results are consistent with the notion that, from a very early age, children begin to learn the rule system governing relationships among different kin categories along with the formal semantics of kin terms.