Lexical repetitions and repair initiation in mother-child talk

This study examines the linguistic and interactional organization of repair in Brazilian Portuguese playtime conversations between six mothers and their children (mean age 2;6). Following both interactional phonetics and conversation analytic methodological approaches, this investigation focuses on how children and mothers negotiate the action done by the mother’s lexical repetition used to initiate repair on the child’s previous turn. The results suggest that children’s ability to understand mothers’ lexical repetitions addressing pronunciation problems comes before their ability to understand repetitions that address problems of lexical choice.