Making It Last: Repetition in Children's Discourse

Abstract

This chapter presents an analysis of repetition in child language from a pragmatic perspective. Pragmatic perspective means simply one that relates an utterance to its context of use. Context is an infinitely extendable notion, but can include such things as the speaker's communicative intention, the speaker–hearer relationship, the extralinguistic setting of the utterance, the linguistic setting of the utterance, and other areas of background knowledge, such as knowledge of conversational norms and conventions. One of the most commonplace observations in the psycholinguistic literature is that many young children often repeat utterances addressed to them. Just as commonplace are generalizations concerning the importance of this behavior to the development of language in the child. With the exception of the child's repetition of adult expansions, repeated utterances are not longer nor transformationally more complex than spontaneous utterances.