Abstract
Background & Objectives: This study focused on the conversational fluency and communication repair strategies of three-, five- and seven-year-old children with normal development in order to identify the process and the characteristics of communication development. Methods: The participants were boys living in Seoul. Our study included 58 participants: 18 in the three-year-old group, 19 in the five-year-old group and 21 in the seven-year-old group. The experiment was performed in a silent room with an adult female experimenter, who was blinded to the purpose of this study and was unknown to any of the participants. The experimenter chose a picture from 20 topic pictures and suggested it as a conversation topic. This method of providing a conversational topic was standardized from previous articles. Progress was recorded on video. After the experiment ended, the researcher watched the video, produced a script for each child, and then analyzed 100 turns of the script. The following elements were analyzed: 1) conversational fluency elements: the frequency of conversation breakdown the percent of time from when the conversational breakdown happened to when the conversation was repaired and the percent of time the two spent in silence. The researcher's impressions and reactions to the children and their conversations were scored using five-point rating scales the number of chosen topic pictures was also assessed. 2) Conversational breakdown elements: Conversation repair strategies and the percent of successful repairs of the broken conservation. Results: The results were as follows. First, the percent of silent time and the duration of a scaled awkward pause significantly decreased with age. Second, one-way conversation was significantly reduced and meaningful exchange of information significantly increased with age. Therefore, the listener's impression of fluent conversation improved with age. Third, the frequency of conversational breakdown and time spent to repair it was significantly reduced with age. Fourth, younger children preferred a receptive strategy to an expressive strategy, and the seven-year-old boys showed no difference between these strategies. For the receptive strategy, the three-year-old boys chose a repetition strategy or an inappropriate strategy significantly more frequently than did the seven-year-old boys. For the expressive strategy, a non-specific verbal type of expressive strategy was significantly preferred with increasing age. Discussion & Conclusion: These results will clinically contribute to the understanding and numerical assessment of the developmental process in Korean children's conversational fluency and conversational breakdown repair strategies.