First-Person Meaning Displacement and Conceptual Assimilation: A Cross-Age Interactional Mechanism, Coding Framework and Research Agenda Requiring No Experiments With Young Children

Conceptual assimilation is a proposed interactional process: a person expresses a first-person experience ("I'm tired", "I don't want to", "I'm afraid", "I want that"), a more powerful or more authoritative interlocutor does not first acknowledge it, and an abstract idea, moral evaluation, identity expectation or the interlocutor's own emotional burden is placed where the experience might otherwise have been addressed. The concept was developed in the EC-ACES manuscripts for young children, where it is linked to a longer-term hypothesis about premature or rigid internalization of external standards. This paper does something narrower and more testable. It (1) states the core construct, the five-step interaction sequence and its interruption points; (2) separates the part of the account that is an observable interactional pattern from the part that is a developmental hypothesis; (3) presents a library of illustrative cases, each analysed step by step; (4) presents an eight-layer coding procedure and the way it can be applied to adult talk and text; (5) positions the construct against psychological control, conditional regard, introjection, contingent self-worth, early maladaptive schemas, true/false self, internal working models and parentification, and states the test of incremental value; and (6) proposes a research agenda that needs no experiments with young children: discourse analysis of adult interaction, coder-reliability and expert-review studies on written material, adult scenario studies, adult retrospective studies, professional and caregiver surveys, media-text analysis and normative analysis of children's rights. The paper asks scholars for critique first and collaboration second.