The Emergence of Self-Repair: A Case Study of One Child During the Early Preschool Years

Abstract

Learning how to talk during the early preschool years involves the appropriation of cultural norms, conventions, and sense-making social practices. In this article, I document the emergence of self-repair practices of a preschool child between the ages of 1 and 3;6 years. Employing a longitudinal single-case approach extract, examples provide insights into the resources that a child employs when acquiring the ability to self-repair. The findings indicate that during the early years, self-repair is a more common occurrence than other-initiated repair, and the ability to self-repair rests on skills of sound/utterance alteration, repetition, conversation monitoring, and an orientation to self-positioning in discourse. The likelihood of the child producing self-repair is associated with the non-response of a coparticipant, highlighting a sensitivity to the interdependence of talk, gesture, and action. It is also linked to the requirements of communicative clarity, implicating the significance of sequential position when repairing. Concluding comments touch on the interactional consequences of repair organization and the variety of discourse contexts served by self and other-initiated self-repair.

Notes

1 Gene Lerner, in an extended discussion with an anonymous reviewer of this article, made the point that although there are intimate connections between repair and preference/dispreference (see also, Schegloff, 2007) organization, issues surrounding what speakers produce after a nonuptake await clarification in the literature. Lerner noted that a reissuing of a “first” where there is a noticeable absence of a conditionally relevant matching action-type can be a type of repair. I would like to acknowledge the valuable role of this input to the ongoing development of this article.

2 At the time of submission of this article, these extracts could also be viewed at http://www.kent.ac.uk/psychology/department/people/forresterma/qtmov.htm.

3 A statistical test indicated the preference for self-repair over other repair over this period in question (sign test: p < .01).

4 The appendix provides an example of instructional correction in which the child does not respond.

5 Interested readers can view the digitized recording of the extracts on the CHILDES database. Extract details are itemized within the software program CLAN as CLANX (Mac) WebData/childes/English-uk/Forrester: Extract 1: lines 765–782; file /69.cha Extract 2(a): lines 62–82; file /89.cha Extract 2(b): lines 310–354; file/89.cha Extract 3: lines 933–952; file/108.cha Extract 4(a): lines 593–613; file/125.cha Extract 4(b): lines 642–665; file/125.cha Extract 5: lines 34–48; file/140.cha Extract 6: lines 213–244; file/159.cha Extract 7: lines 888–909; file/180.cha

6 The events preceding this extract can be seen in the full video transcripts available in the CHILDES file (69.cha), with examples occurring at lines 711, 730, 746, and 749. For reasons of space, descriptions of these occasions are not included here.

7 The developmental data on young children's understanding and recognition of communication failure of the type described here are for the most part restricted to experimental studies in which children are asked to explain speaker and listener problems with potential misunderstandings. It is not until around 4 years that children provide adequate and defensible explanatory account (e.g., see Robinson, 1981).

8 Distinguishing what is sequentially implicated regarding the kinds of actions a speaker engages in following a nonuptake can be particularly challenging with adult–child interaction. In this instance, the mutual eye gaze between participants may or may not serve as evidence of recognition that a first has occurred. Not responding when looking at the other would appear to be a quite different (and less ambiguous) action compared to not responding when it remains unclear whether an addressee has heard or not (no eye gaze).

9 This is identifiable at line 160 of the 89.cha file; see http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/data/Eng-UK/Forrester.zip.

10 Interestingly, and as evidence that this conversation is being carefully monitored, the older sister (EV) also turns and looks at E and F following F's NTRI and turns away at the same point following the child's repair.

11 Interested readers may wish to view the associated recording to note the manner of the coparticipant's orientation to the child's talk.