Marie Leroy-Collombel

How mother and child co-(re) construct non-conventional productions in spontaneous interaction

Following a usage-based approach of language acquisition, the goal of this article is to make a detailed analysis of other and self-repairs targeting a French child’s non-conventional productions between 1;09 and 4;0. The study’s hypotheses were that (1) the mother would start by offering repairs and later in development use strategies to lead the child towards self-repair; (2) she would focus on repairing different linguistic levels at different stages of the child’s development; (3) she would favor the flow of communication over formal correction; (4) the child would progressively detect mismatches between her input and her output and self-repair her own productions. The results showed that the mother frequently intervened at first by offering direct and indirect repairs but progressively elicited the child’s own repairs through repair initiations. Repairs were thus often co-constructed through multiple turns before being fully initiated by the child. The mother and child’s repairs targeted different linguistic levels according to the child’s development and to her age.