Repetition In Child Conversation

The role of repetition in children's discourse has been much discussed in psychology, language acquisition and anthropology, while few scholars study on repetition in Mandarin child's conversation in China. Based on a case study, this study investigates repetition in children's conversation by using methods from conversation analysis.The participant of this study is one Mandarin-speaking 10-year-old child. Using methods from conversation analysis, this microgenetic longitudinal case study traces one Mandarin 10-year-old child for ten months for recording. The data includes 40 hours of four natural contexts'conversations. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are carried out to analyze 1022 repetitions collected from the data, aiming to explore the forms and functions of repetitions in the 10-year-old child's conversations. Repetitions can be lexical, syntactic and discoursal, and they express four basic functions: comprehension, production, connection, and interaction. It is found that syntactic repetitions occur most in each context in a 10-year-old child's daily conversations, which is consistent with the results of the studies on repetition in Chinese conversations, while with big differences that lexical repetitions occur most in English conversations. Furthermore, a 10-year-old child uses repetition mostly for an interactive function. She uses different forms of repetitions to perform a variety of interactive function such as cooperation, confirmation request ect. to easily achieve communicative goals in conversations. Some functions such as humor, savoring which are never found in child conversations at the early stages have also been found in a 10-year-old child's conversations.In addition, we also make a discussion on factors influencing use of repetition. Psychological goals and emotions are inner-self factors which influence functions of repetition. In social world, factors of social context and native language have been studied, which also have a remarkable influence on children using various forms of repetition to express different functions in different contexts. It indicates that a 10-year-old child's repetitions for different functions are not constructed at random. Repetitions often reflect the different psychologies of children in different conversational contexts.The present study is an active attempt by applying method of microgenetic analysis to do a research on repetition in 10-year-old children's conversations. It argues that society and parents should pay more attention on the rebellious psychology of children at the late stages through a better understanding of their repetitive discourse.