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Abstract: The term repair refers to strategies deployed by language users to resolve breakdowns in communication. In this study, I ask what strategies for conversational repair are deployed, and who takes responsibility for their execution, when a language is used in a small local signing ecology. I focus on signers from a single family within a larger speech community that does not use a national signed language and analyze conversations from four dyads of signers who engaged in a director-matcher referential communication task. I find that for three of the four dyads, there is a preference for restricted repairs that closely matches studies of repair in other signed and spoken languages. I also find a strong connection between participant role and repair type—with matchers more likely to use other-initiated repairs while directors produced self-repairs. The findings from this study highlight the complex relationship between participant identities and pragmatic strategies and the complicated social function of different types of repair in interaction.
Laura Horton (Fri,) studied this question.