A comparison of bilingual and monolingual children’s conversational repairs

Abstract

This study examined the conversational repair skills of 2- and 3-year-old French— English bilingual children and monolingual French-speaking children. While the ability to respond to requests for clarification has been well researched in monolingual children, it has not been investigated among bilingual children except to examine their ability to repair breakdowns due to the use of a language not spoken by their interlocutor. The present study provides a direct comparison of bilingual and monolingual children’s repairs of the types of breakdowns in conversations that are experienced by both populations, e.g., breakdowns due to ambiguity, choice of words, mispronunciations, inaudible utterances, and so on. A methodology of stacked requests for clarification was used to examine the range of response strategies and the overall response patterns of the children.The results reveal no differences between the bilingual and the monolingual children’s conversational repair skills. The present findings contribute to the growing body of evidence that bilingualism does not interfere with the language development of simultaneous bilinguals. As well, they extend our understanding of their ability to repair conversational breakdowns of the type that are experienced by all children.