The Emergence of Self-Repair: A Case Study of One Child During the Early Preschool Years

Abstract

Learning how to talk during the early preschool years involves the appropriation of cultural norms, conventions, and sense-making social practices. In this article, I document the emergence of self-repair practices of a preschool child between the ages of 1 and 3;6 years. Employing a longitudinal single-case approach extract, examples provide insights into the resources that a child employs when acquiring the ability to self-repair. The findings indicate that during the early years, self-repair is a more common occurrence than other-initiated repair, and the ability to self-repair rests on skills of sound/utterance alteration, repetition, conversation monitoring, and an orientation to self-positioning in discourse. The likelihood of the child producing self-repair is associated with the non-response of a coparticipant, highlighting a sensitivity to the interdependence of talk, gesture, and action. It is also linked to the requirements of communicative clarity, implicating the significance of sequential position when repairing. Concluding comments touch on the interactional consequences of repair organization and the variety of discourse contexts served by self and other-initiated self-repair.