A sudy of repair behavior in mandarin mother-child conversation

• Main Authors: Li, I Hsien, 李怡嫻
• Other Authors: Huang, Chiung Chih
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/09189304038980491935

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 語言學研究所 === 98 === The use of repair strategies has been pointed out as important characteristics for children to develop mature conversation skills. This thesis aims to investigate how children acquire repair in the interaction with their mothers. Six dyads in three age groups from three to five year olds are investigated. There are three research questions proposed: first, what patterns of repair are used by Mandarin-speaking three-year-old, four-year-old, and five-year-old children? Second, is there a developmental change in children’s repair types, linguistic forms, and pragmatic functions in conversation? Finally, how would mothers’ repair linguistic forms and pragmatic functions change with children’s age? Each repair utterance in the repair sequence of children and their mothers was analyzed in term of: (1) Repair types: SISR, OISR, SIOR, and OIOR (Schegloff, 1992). (2) Linguistic forms: nonverbal, lexical, syntactic, editing term (Ke, 2005), and combination. (3) Pragmatic functions: emphasis, specification, confirmation, elaboration, and floor-holding (Garvey, 1984; Chang, 1998; Wei, 2003). The result showed that younger children contributed relatively higher percentages of OIOR than older children. In contrast, older children contributed relatively higher percentages of SISR than younger children. It appeared that trend of the provision of guidance by mothers may decrease as children’s ability to repair developed with age. Second, it appeared that the influence between the children and the mothers is mutual in the course of interaction. In other words, children’s maturity of repair ability influences how the mothers interact with the children. Moreover, the findings display children’s discrepancy in language development around three years old. It is observed that three-year-old group adopts Lexical of linguistic forms to repair. On the other hand, older children used Syntactic and Editing term of linguistic forms to repair. Finally, the interaction of linguistic forms and pragmatic function displayed that both mothers and the children in all age groups use more Specification than other categories. It appears that in mother-child interaction, both parties tend to apply repair to specify the other’s intention. The result also indicates that older children appear to use repair to display their involvement in the conversation for an even large variety of pragmatic functions.