Development of conversational repair strategies in response to requests for clarification

Conversational repair sequences are an important aspect of communicative interaction. These sequences may occur in the event of communication failure if a listener requests clarification of a previous aspect of the speaker's message. The purpose of this study was to investigate the repair strategies employed in conversation by children at four age levels. Ten linguistically normal children were sampled from each of the following age levels: 2:7 to 3:10, 4:10 to 5:10, 6:10 to 7:10, and 8:10 to 9:10 (years:months), resulting in a total of 40 subjects. Each subject was asked to describe a series of action pictures for an examiner who was seated behind a screen. At regular intervals, the examiner responded to the child's description by initiating a stacked repair sequence. Results indicated that subjects at all age levels complied with the initial request for clarification the majority of the time. However, with increasing age, subjects became more adept at handling the stacked sequence of requests for clarification. Older children were more responsive to the requests, and 9-year-old subjects demonstrated a wider range of strategies in providing repairs.