| This research goes beyond child repetition studies which focused on two-party conversations (Keenan 1977, McTear 1978, Casby 1986, Ervin-Tripp 1986 and others), by investigating the relation between utterance direction and repetition in conversations of two to four participants. I demonstrate how an English-Japanese bilingual child (Sandy 3;10) and monolingual Japanese children repeated utterances addressed to them and others in 9 utterance directions in a 40-hour videotaped corpus of play conversations. Sandy used more repetition with more utterance directions (3.77% of her total utterances) than monolingual Japanese children repeating Japanese native participants (Group B) (1.07%) and Japanese children repeating Sandy (Group C) (0.52%).; I identified 22 functions of repetition, which I categorized as: (1) second parts of adjacency pairs, (2) relating to the original utterance, (3) practicing language, (4) discourse strategies, and (5) imitation. I define utterance direction as a combination of "the addressee of the original utterance - the addressee of the repeated utterance." Frequent use of repetitions with "Repeater-Originator," "3rd Person-3rd Person," and "Originator (Self)-Repeater (Self)" utterance direction, that is, repetitions with directional symmetry, suggests direction of repeated utterance correlates well with that of the original utterance.; Sandy (44% of Sandy's total repetition) and Group B (41.9%) repeated "original utterances addressed to the repeater" the most followed by "utterances addressed to a 3rd person" (40% and 37.2%, respectively). While all groups used "Repeater-Originator" repetition to confirm the original utterance, Sandy and Group B used "3rd Person-3rd Person" to participate by shadowing (Tannen 1989).; Sandy repeated utterances to herself more often (36.8% of her repetition) than the Japanese children (B=23.3%, C=9.5%). Only Sandy used repetition to practice language ("Originator (Self)-Repeater (Self)" and "3rd Person-Repeater (Self)"), and only monolingual Japanese children repeated Sandy to correct her ("Originator (Self)-Originator").; In conclusion, this research provides a model for analyzing utterance direction and contributes to research on how children acquire language through repetition. It gives evidence for how children not only observe (Rogoff et al. 2003) but also participate and practice language even when utterances are not addressed to them. |
