Hearing-impaired children's strategies for managing communication breakdowns

Abstract

This article discusses communication breakdowns and strategies that are used to repair them. It focuses on other-initiated repair sequences (Brinton and Fujiki, 1989), such as when a listener fails to understand a speaker's utterance and indicates this by making a clarification request. Following the clarification request the speaker then tries to repair the communication breakdown. Both specific and non-specific clarification requests are discussed as devices for signalling communication breakdowns and initiating repair. Repetition and revision are discussed as repair strategies. The literature on the strategies of hearing-impaired children for managing communication breakdowns is then reviewed with reference to three research methodologies: naturalistic, elicitation and referential communication research. An approach to the assessment and development of the strategies of hearing-impaired children for managing communication breakdown is then suggested, based on the referential communication research of P. Lloyd (1991, 1992, 1993).