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

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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 otherinitiated

self-repair.