A Study Of Other-repetition In Mother-child Interaction

In daily conversation,repetition performs various communicative functions.Other-repetition is a major feature of parent-child conversation.Previous studies have shown that parents tend to use more repetition when talking to children than with adults.However,the research in this area is still relatively few,which is worth further study.Based on Huang's(2010,2012)classification of the forms and functions of other-repetition,this paper analyzes other-repetition in mother-child interaction,aiming to reveal the characteristics of the use of other-repetition in mother-child interaction.In this paper,four pairs of daily conversation between mother and child are selected as research data and they are divided into high educational background group and low educational background group according to the different educational background of mothers.Through qualitative and quantitative analysis,this paper attempts to investigate the other-repetition from the distribution of forms and functions,vocabulary and syntactic features.In addition,considering the differences of mother's educational background,this paper makes a comparative study of the two groups,aiming to find the similarities and differences between the two groups.The results show that,in form,mothers and children tend to use more exact repetition,and most of the exact repetition appear in the situation that mothers teach children to learn Chinese words or English words.At the lexical level,nouns are used most frequently.The extensive use of English vocabulary is a major feature of mothers' and children's other-repetition.At the syntactic level,mothers use more interrogative sentences while children use more declarative sentences.In terms of function,both mothers and children use other-repetition to perform various communicative functions.The comparative analysis shows the differences in using English vocabulary between the two groups,the high educational background group output more English vocabulary.In function,the two groups didn't show significant differences.Through the analysis of other-repetition in mother-child interaction,this study reveals the rules of spoken Chinese and the rules of first language acquisition to a certain extent.It also provides reference for the guidance function of mother's daily words on contributing to the children's cognitive development.In addition,other-repetition can promote the interaction between parents and children.Parents can try to use repetition to strengthen the interaction with their children and promote the children's communicative ability and language development.Finally,this study also has some reference for the oral expression of Chinese daily conversation in the international Chinese teaching.