Studying Misunderstanding and Repair in Adult-Child Interactions: Lessons from Conversations with Typically Developing Children and High Functioning Children with Autism

kdelves unimelb.edu.au Abstract. This paper investigates misunderstanding and repair in a corpus of dyadic interactions between an adult and 10 children aged 4-7 years, half of whom were typically-developing (TD), and half of whom had been diagnosed with high functioning autism (HFA). These interactions have been transcribed and analysed using CA con-ventions and used as the focus of a preliminary examination of simi-larities and differences in repair behaviour by children with HFA compared with TD children. However, the data give rise to significant questions and issues of a more general nature. In particular, how we understand and define the notion of “repair ” and operationalise iden-tifying and categorising it. We call on the concept of grounding in interaction to broaden our understanding of misunderstanding and re-pair in adult-child interactions and to present our data in a more de-tailed fashion