The consumption of food is often accompanied by non-lexical sounds that draw attention to the food as tasted, such as the 'mmm's and lip-smacks that suggest gustatory pleasure. These sound objects – often overlooked by linguistics and food researchers – can be shown to be intricately coordinated between the person consuming and the person voicing these utterances. In this paper, we examine taste as a social and interactional practice. In particular, we consider those moments in which one person can vocally and visually enact tasting for another: when parents are helping their infants with their first mouthfuls of solid food. This presentation will thus detail the interactional dynamics of infant mealtimes. The data are taken from a corpus of 66 video-recorded infant mealtimes in Scotland, from five families, with a total of around 19 hours of interaction. Infants are between 5-8 months old. A multimodal interaction analysis is used to examine how and when non-lexical vocalisations are used by parents in infant mealtimes as if tasting on behalf of the infant. The analysis will raise theoretical and empirical issues in relation to the epistemics of taste, on who is tasting, how tasting is produced as a particular social event where vocalisations are used to convey meaning, and on how the sound objects enable parents to bridge the gap between themselves and their child's eating practices. The communicative potential of tasting sounds furthermore helps us target the core issue of linguistics: the analytical boundary between words and non-words. The presentation will therefore contribute to applied linguistics of food research but also to work on sensory practices, lexicology, and social psychological studies of eating.
