An Experimental Study On Children's Recognizing And Repairing Communicative Failures

Communicative failure is a common circumstance in daily interaction. And the research on it was mainly conducted from two aspects. But it is noticeable that what Chinese scholars have focused on is mainly the intercultural communicative failures, and some scholars investigate communicative failures occurring in texts. Little research on communicative failures is from cognitive perspective, and no experimental study on children's recognition and repairing of communicative failures is conducted in China. By applying Relevance Theory, Theory of Conversational Implicature and so on, this thesis discusses possible communicative failures in mental process. Moreover, it is found that almost all communicative failures fall into the taxonomy which Baosco et al. proposed. Hence based on Baosco et al's taxonomy of communicative failures, the thesis conducts an experiment with 40 Chinese children (all are in grade one of primary school) as subjects to analyze the result of recognition and repair task so as to discuss the difference of difficulty in Chinese children's recognizing and repairing different kinds of communicative failures. The data collected from the experiment is analyzed by Paired-Samples T test, and the result shows that when children recognize and repair the three communicative failures:(1) Failure of expressive act is easier to recognize than failure of the actor's meaning. If the hearer's response is direct refusal by saying "No", failure of the communicative effect is the easiest to recognize among the three communicative failures. If the hearer's refusal is implicit, the failure of the communicative effect is more difficult to recognize than failure of expressive act, but it is as difficulty to recognize as failure of the actor's meaning.(2) As regards the subcategories, recognition of non-comprehension is simpler than recognition of misunderstanding, as is applicable to both the case of failure of the expressive act and failure of the actor's meaning. And in the case of failure of the communicative effect, recognizing the rejection of a move is just as difficult as recognizing a refusal to play the game. And direct/explicit refusal is easier to recognize than implicit refusal.(3) Repair of communicative failures shows a cline of difficulty along the dimension of increasing repair complexity, from the simplest to the most complex: from repair of the expressive act to repair of the actor's meaning to repair of the communicative effect. (4) For both failure of expressive act and failure of the actor's meaning, there is no difference between repair of non-comprehension and repair of misunderstanding. But in failure of communicative effect, repairing a rejection of move is easier than repairing a refusal to play the game.Focusing on communicative failures which occur in different phases of mental process in the hearer's understanding and reaction, this study conducts an experiment and finds the difference in children's performance when they recognize and repair communicative failures. This research is the first experimental study on communicative failures in China, and its findings are expected to provide some useful information for relevant studies on Chinese Children's acquisition of language.