10 - Metalinguistic behaviour

Summary

Introductory remarks

As suggested in Chapter 9, metalinguistic behaviour may be an important contributing factor in any changes taking place in a child's linguistic system(s) during acquisition. If this hypothesis is at all valid, the material from Kate should show an increase or a change in metalinguistic behaviour slightly before or simultaneously with the changes observed in her speech production in general. Since metalinguistic behaviour presumably is the outcome of general metacognitive development (see e.g. Clark 1982), one would not expect to see any language-specific metalinguistic behaviour; rather, increases or changes in metalinguistic behaviour should occur independently of whether Kate is using Dutch or English.

In the following, we shall proceed by first analysing any signs of metalinguistic behaviour as it presents itself in the corpus. After discussing issues pertaining to this metalinguistic behaviour itself, we shall come back to the hypothesis above.

Possible signs of metalinguistic behaviour as they appear in the corpus are spontaneous (or self-initiated) repairs, elicited (or other-initiated) repairs, sound-play, hesitations, self-repetitions and explicit metalinguistic statements. How exactly these phenomena can be seen as signs of metalinguistic behaviour will be discussed where relevant (see also section 10.6).

Spontaneous repairs

Spontaneous repairs are speaker-initiated self-corrections. The term ‘correction’ reflects the fact that the speaker changes something to an utterance (in the course of its production), presumably in order to improve on it in some way or other. The ‘improvement’ may or may not result in a formally or referentially more appropriate utterance.