6 Reformulations
Research has demonstrated how the dynamics of adult–child conversations guide children’s acquisition of language, including homing in the conventional meaning of a word (Clark, 2020). Particularly significant are adult reformulations of child utterances which typically follow immediately after children make an error, in the next conversational turn. For example:
(1) Abe (2 years, 5 months): the plant didn’t cried.
Father: The plant cried?
Abe: no.
Father: oh, the plant didn’t cry.
Abe: uh-huh.
These interactions provide children with an opportunity to compare their own (erroneous) form with a conventional form for the same meaning. Young children pay attention to such reformulations and make some sort of response in the next conversational turn 45 per cent of the time (Chouinard and Clark, 2003), for example:
(2) D (2 years. 4 months, as his father picked him up in his arms and swung him near the top of the stairs): Don’t fall me down stairs!
Father: Oh, I wouldn’t drop you downstairs.
D: Don’t drop me downstairs.
By contrasting their own speech to the that of adults, children make readjustments to their words, sounds, grammar and meaning, fine-tuning their language to be more conventional (Clark, 1982; Clark and Bowerman, 1986; Slobin, 1971). This idea is picked up further in Session 6, which will take a closer look at how children overcome some of the language errors they make. Children’s self-repairs also show that they monitor their own speech, and make repairs when they detect a mismatch to the form they had intended to produce, or see signs that their partner doesn’t understand what they are saying, as in the following example:
(3) Brenda (1 year, 8 months talking with her mother as she held up her mother’s shoe and looked at it): mama. mama. mama. mama. sh. shi. sh. shiss. shoe. shoesh.
Mother: Shoes!
Each time the infant speaks in this example she makes slight changes, eventually approximating the conventional form, followed by her mother immediately re-enforcing it (‘Shoes!’) and indicating she has understood.
As children get older, they become increasingly adept at repairing conversation if it breaks down, appropriately responding to requests for clarification, and confirming what was heard or refining meaning in response to questions. When a partner clearly does not understand, young children tend to just repeat the failed message verbatim (as in example 4), while older children are more likely to revise their messages, adding a minor change (example 5), repeating the relevant part of speech (examples 6 and 7) or disambiguating a referent (8 and 9), presumably understanding that saying things differently might help (Tomasello, Farrar and Dines, 1984).
(4) Child: I want milk.
Mother: What?
Child: I want milk.
(5) Child: put milk glass?
Mother: What?
Child: put milk in glass.
(6) Child: I want milk.
Mother:You want what?
Child:milk.
(7) Child: Put milk in glass.
Mother: Put milk where?
Child: in glass.
(8) Child: I want it.
Mother: You want what?
Child: milk.
(9) Child: put milk there.
Mother: Put the milk where?
Child: in cup.