Negotiating the action done by mothers' reparative repetitions

Following the interactional phonetics and the Conversation Analysis methodological approaches, this study examines the interactional and linguistic organization of repair in Brazilian Portuguese conversations between 6 mothers and their children (mean age 2,5). This is an investigation on how mothers and children negotiate the action done by the mother’s lexical repetition of the child’s previous turn. The results show that children learn repair initiation in phases, and that the ability to understand mothers’ repetitions addressing pronunciation problems comes before the ability to understand repetitions that address problems of lexical choice.