Repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions

Abstract In forty child-to-child dialogs in Mandarin retrieved from CHILDES, 74.23% of the total utterances contain the phenomenon of repetition, with self-repetitions (64.85%) occurring more frequently than other-repetitions (35.15%). Based upon the distribution of the various types of repetitions in the database, this paper also discusses the structural dimensions of repetition at different grammatical levels, concluding that self-repetition and other-repetition in child conversation are not merely copies of previously used linguistic material, but key strategies that children apply to construct their utterances and dialogic interactions. Children’s discourses develop from self-repetitions to other-repetitions, and by doing this, cohesion in discourse is achieved.