Catherine Garvey: Children's Talk. Published by  Fontana, 1984. Paperback, £2.95.

This book is part of The Developing Child series edited by Jerome Bruner, Michael Cole and Barbara Lloyd. The series is a useful source of information about current academic work in child development, a field which is producing work of far greater interest and relevance to psycho-analysis than was once the case. This volume, although giving a glimpse of the Wider field of language research, is chiefly concerned with Catherine Garvey's own study of children's talk. The book is especially readable as the author gives a considerable number of verbatim reports of the conversation of small children, who thus have a chance to come alive for the reader as they struggle to share toys, organize their games and discuss the ways of the world. The research study is presented as throwing light on such conversations rather than taking precedence over them.

Catherine Garvey's study falls into two parts — a larger-scale study of 3-5 year olds observed in a laboratory playroom, and a longitudinal study of three children, aged 2-3 years at the start. These children were videoed both at home and at the laboratory with their “best friend” and their mothers. At least in the form in which it is presented in this book, the size of the study seems to allow for a more individual case study approach rather than a statistical one and the need for standardization and rigour in the research design do not obtrude at the expense of complexity and interest. On the contrary, the author seems to have in mind the study of talk in the hurly-burly of everyday life.

Catherine Garvey refers several times to the work of Erving Goffman, who was a key figure in moving Sociology in the direction of more subtle participant observation methods of research and away from the crudeness of the standardized interview and the large-scale survey. It is this spirit which seems apparent in the following comment about the status of video and audio recordings:

“Talk is a very complex activity. Like other human activities, i