Abstract
This paper reports a longitudinal case study of a child's language development. Our subject often replies with 'n?' or 'un?' in raising intonation to the adults when she is spoken to. Such short questions are thought as conversational repairs based on several facts. We observed her language development from the point of her vocabulary, MLU, the number of conversational repairs that she requested, and her mother's reactions to her repair requests. We found that conversations of the same topic lasts longer when conversational repairs are requested, and that her mother's reactions to her requests for conversational repairs are significantly different in the last five months from the first five months of our observation, which possibly reflects the child's language development. Based on the results, we suggest that our subject's language development has been promoted by her active conversational repairs.
