Communication With Friends and Non‐Friend Peers: An Examination of Dyadic Connectedness Across Two Play Contexts

Abstract

ABSTRACT Children's peer interactions provide an important setting for their developing communication skills. The current study analyses connectedness—the topical coherence of children's conversational turns—to explore how children coordinate their interactions across two play contexts. We coded the observed connected talk of 82 same‐gender dyads ( N = 152 children, 41.4% girls, 58.6% boys, M age = 6.79 years, SD = 0.38) during both freeplay and goal‐directed contexts through repeated measures. We then modelled the rates of connected talk in relation to dyad gender (girl, boy) and friendship status (friends, non‐friend peers) with a between‐subjects multi‐level analysis. There was a significantly higher rate of connectedness in the goal‐directed context than in freeplay ( β = −0.04), which was qualified by a friendship status by context interaction ( β = 0.10). Subsequent simple effects analysis showed that only non‐friend dyads engaged in significantly more connected talk during the goal‐directed context than in freeplay ( β = −0.11), with equivalent connectedness across context for friend dyads ( β = −0.02). These findings highlight the role of dyadic characteristics and contextual features for children's play and communication. Highlights The current study examines the extent to which children's connectedness is influenced by interaction context and friendship status. Though friends engaged in similar rates of connected talk across two contexts, non‐friends engaged in more connected talk during goal‐directed drawing when compared to freeplay. It is therefore important to focus on both context and dyad features for understanding children's peer communication.