This paper described the emergence of communicative repairs in the prelinguistic, early one word, late one word, and multiword stages of language development. The communicative repair is a necessary skill for successful social and communicative functioning. Previous research has investigated the conversational repairs of children in linguistic stages of development. This study identified the point of emergence of repairs and the rates, patterns and means used by very young communicators. / Videotaped samples of communicative repairs, taken from the administration of the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales (Wetherby & Prizant, 1993) with 120 typically developing children and 12 children with communicative impairments, were coded to identify the components of their repair behaviors. Data were collected on repair form (gestures and vocalizations), content (words and phrases) and use (interactant and prosodic changes) and to determine whether repair attempts were repetitions or modifications. Modified repair components were further described as changes, additions, reductions or omissions. / The two primary findings from this study were that communicative repairs emerge at the same time that a child develops the ability to communicate intentionally and that gestures are integral to preconversational repairs. Descriptions of repair behaviors revealed several developmental patterns. Repetition as an exclusive strategy for repair was rarely utilized. At all stages, children repeated their gestures to repair to a greater extent than they modified their vocalizations to repair more than they repeated them. Repairs containing words and phrases increased as a reflection of the child's acquisition of words and word combinations. Changing communicative partners and prosodic features as a means of repair appeared to be secondary repair strategies for small numbers of children. / Finally, it was determined that with minor additions the research protocol provided an adequate measure of the repair behaviors of children with pervasive developmental disorder and hearing impairment. The addition of coding categories for manual words separately from spoken words and for gestural prosody was needed to accurately describe their repair behaviors. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-05, Section: B, page: 2590. / Major Professor: Amy M. Wetherby. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_77459 |
| Contributors | Alexander, Dianne G., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 110 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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