Self- and Other-Repairs in Child-Adult Interaction: A Case Study of a Pair of Persian-Speaking Twins

Abstract

Twenty-five years ago, Schegloff (1989) proposed that repair is the most crucial factor in understanding the nature of language development. By observing and examining the repairs children make, not only can we understand repair organization, but also children language development and cognitive stage. Research in syntactic structure of repair, self-initiated self-repair (SISR) or other-repair have gained enough attention in recent years through the works of Forrester (2008), Radford (2008), and Morgenstern, Leroy, & Caef (2013). Some studies analyzed both self-repair and other-repair (Morgenstern et al., 2013; Salonen & Laakso, 2009; Forrester, 2008), whereas a few other studies analyzed only other-repairs from the perspective of parents (Huang, 2011). There are many studies done regarding the incidence of self-repair over other-repair (Schegloff et al., 1977); the relationship between repair and turn (Schegloff, 1988); corrective feedback (Laakso & Soininen, 2010); other-repetition (Huang, 2011); and adult’s self-repair (Laakso & Sorjonen, 2010). However, there is some inconsistency in their findings. The data for this study comprised four video-recorded adult-child interactions at a children’s home in various interactional activities (role-play, short story, or watching cartoons. The purpose of this study is to examine the incidence of self- and other-repairs in the language acquisition process of Persian children and to investigate if there is a relationship between child’s self-repair and adult’s other-repair.