Self-Repair In Developing Oral Language Of A 5-Year-Old, A Case Study

Children's language is a dynamic, progressing system, which is more likely to reveal the underlying linguistic mechanism. The self-repair study in children's speech is an indispensable part of children's language study. Hence, the present study intends to give a descriptive and explanatory account of various self-repairs in a 5-year-old's speech.The online nature of spontaneous speech gives rise to various types of speech errors, dysfluencies and repairs. Traditionally, speech errors have been seen as exposures of the underlying language-formulating processor and the analysis of the repair mechanisms will offer us a glimpse into the psychological and linguistic processes at work in speech production and communication. It has invited the attention of psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, neurolinguistics, etc, which have exerted enormous efforts in the relevant researches to unveil the nature of human speech production and theories as well. With assiduous efforts, researchers have made expansive achievements in the wide scope of linguistic study, including the establishment of speech production models and diverse linguistic theories. These researches also boost the study of speech repairs. However, the domestic self-repair studies in language acquisition, especially in Chinese language acquisition is still neglected and almost barren, so the author intends to touch on this domain by a longitudinal case study of a 5-year-old's self-repairs.In this study, the author builds her own corpus of self-repairs after conducting a seven-month investigation into self-repair behaviors of the 5-year-old, and based on Levelt's self-repair taxonomy (1983), we find six types of overt repairs, namely, lexical repair, syntactic repair, ambiguity repair, appropriate-level repair, coherence repair, different repair, and one type of covert repair, i.e., repetition repair. We find that the child's self-repair behaviors are related to the processing in the Conceptualizer and the Formulator. The Conceptualizer is the module responsible for planning information structure and content represented in the so-called preverbal message while the Formulator retrieves the semantic and syntactic properties of lexical items.This investigation of the 5-year-old's self-repair behaviors reveals the status of his language acquisition. Secondly, the investigation partially unveils the linguistic strategies the child employed to maintain the ongoing discourse and to hold the normal speech flow, which, to some degree, unfold the underneath psychological and linguistic processes involved in self-repair behaviors. Besides, this study of the child's self-repair behaviors, in many aspects, argues for the underlying speech-formulating mechanism proposed by Levelt, which may serve as a window to the nature of children's speech errors and repairs and also as a valuable reference for children's language study and language instruction.