The types of repairs, categories of repairs, repairs in doctor-patient communication, and repair strategies from the perspective of psycholinguistics

The nature of human spontaneous speech brings about speech errors and typical disfluencies such as hesitation, pause, silence, repetition, and repair. Recent studies in spoken dialects across many countries reported that speakers produce speech errors or unclear expressions in daily verbal communication. When speakers realize their utterances are erroneous or inappropriate, they frequently make pervasive, highly systematic, and measurable repairs in conversation. Some researchers claim that the repairs in conversation are ubiquitous. This occurrence reflects that individuals make great efforts to ensure their utterances are understandable and acceptable to the listeners. This also triggered the question of what role do speech repairs play in building mutual understanding and enhancing therapeutic relationships between doctors and patients during clinical interactions. Most of these studies have predominantly focused on first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition, while limited studies have investigated repairs in clinical settings. Repair is a key mechanism for building mutual understanding in clinical interactions and contributes to better therapeutic relationships and treatment adherence. Doctors and patients attempt to make their utterances understandable and acceptable to attain their purposes in the clinical encounter. Nevertheless, some studies do not describe the categories of repair strategies and the trouble source, while only limited research mentioned the types of repair. This gives no insights into the specific strategies and trouble sources in the communication. This study, therefore, sets out to review the types of repairs, categories of repairs, repairs in doctor-patient communication, and repair strategies in attempting to explain the repair mechanism that works in the communication setting between doctor-patient interactions from the perspective of epistemic, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and psycholinguistics.