Using videotaped interaction of U.S. preschool classrooms, this study investigates how children learn to manage peer conflict. Whether conflict occurs vocally or non-vocally affects socialization of children’s behaviors. Negotiation of arguments by teachers somewhat depend on whether children sustain conflict in a vocal or embodied modality. Teachers use directive/response sequences to engage with children’s vocalized disputes. Moving conflict to a non-vocal channel by embodying a dispute thus enables children to exercise agency often without teacher intervention, or with minimal intervention. Embodied conflicts provide children with a way to sustain their disputes often without notice from teachers. Children learn how to employ eye-gaze and body positioning to engage in these disputes. Thus, children learn about the values of vocalized and non-vocalized behavior for enacting peer conflict as a student in an American teacher-gated preschool classroom where sound achieves primacy over non-vocalized behaviors. (author abstract)