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A clearing of the throat will usually do it. In the old days, they would prefix a comment with something like 'I say,...' (these days, it is more likely to be a slackerishly inflected 'Hey,...'). A basic rule of conversation is that you don't start imparting your wisdom until you know you have got the attention of the intended recipient. Unless you've prepared the ground in this way, your words are likely to fall on deaf ears.

When do children learn about this essential convention? It must have a lot to do with their developing understanding of how attention works. Anyone who has spent time with a toddler will know that they will just launch into a conversation with little concern for whether their audience can keep up. Those early dialogues are full of attempts, on the part of the adult, to establish exactly what the topic of conversation has changed to now. Indeed, Piaget's explanation of the phenomenon of private speech (speech that doesn't seem to be addressed to anyone except the self) was that children were attempting to communicate without doing enough to adapt their utterances to the perspective of the listener. They weren't, he argued, doing enough to line up their own way of thinking with that of the person within earshot. (I'll be writing some more on this topic in a later post.)