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Self-repair of speech by four-year-old Finnish children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2008

TUULI SALONEN  and
MINNA LAAKSO
TUULI SALONEN
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
MINNA LAAKSO*
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
*
Address for correspondence: Miwnna Laakso, Dept of Speech Sciences, P.O. Box 9, FI-00014University of Helsinki, Finland. e-mail: minna.s.laakso@helsinki.fi
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Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine what four-year-old children repair in their speech. For this purpose, conversational self-repairs (N=316) made by two typically developing Finnish-speaking children (aged 4 ; 8 and 4 ; 11) were examined. The data comprised eight hours of natural interactions videotaped at the children's homes. The tapes were analyzed using conversation analysis. The children made phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical and non-linguistic self-repairs, and also inserted additional material into their utterances. Finnish-speaking children made more syntactic and fewer morphological self-repairs than the previous research on English-speaking children suggests. Furthermore, most self-repairs were found in talk during pretend play. In designing and engaging in such play, the children skilfully used self-repair to match their talk to meet the requirements of different interactive activities and co-participants. Finally, contextual analysis of children's self-repairs showed that these were also socially motivated, and not just related to slips or errors in speech.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , September 2009 , pp. 855 - 882
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[*]

This study was supported by the Academy of Finland, grant 206607, and Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. We want to thank Tuula Savinainen-Makkonen and Jyrki Tuomainen for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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