Interruption in Mandarin Mother-child Conversation∗

The purpose of this study is to investigate the types and functions of mother-to-child and child-to-mother interruptions in conversation. The data analyzed are natural conversations from two Mandarin-speaking mother-child dyads. The children are about three years old. Goldberg’s (1990) categorization of interruptions is adopted to examine the types of the mothers ’ and the children’s interruptions. The results show that both the mothers and the children use more rapport-oriented interruptions than other types of interruptions; they tend to use interruptions to signal their involvement and interest and to construct shared topics cooperatively. In addition, the children’s interruptions are further examined based on Dunn and Shatz’s (1989) framework in order to investigate the semantic relations between the children’s interruptions and the conversational discourse. The findings show that most of the children’s interruptions contain relevant new information. Such interruptions are likely to succeed in getting the attention of and responses from the mothers