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…

This paper explores one way that participants use inscribed objects in their immediate environment as resources for interaction. In particular, it identifies and analyzes a type of embodied response turn found in information request sequences. The data come from a video recording of family members engaged in a joint cooking activity, where they…

This article explores telephone interactions between young children and adult family members as contributing insights to the co-construction of identities within both the nuclear and the extended family. The authors deploy methods of linguistic ethnography to enrich the scope of interpreting the data beyond textual analysis. The study's premise…

Outlines and analyzes the speech that mothers, fathers, and children spontaneously quote at dinnertime. Shows differences in the use of reported speech between mothers, fathers, and children. Describes the correlation between use of reported speech by mothers and children. (HB)

The conversations of 10 deaf children (ages 10-12) and their families at dinnertime were examined, and spoken and signed verbal exchanges were documented. Results showed that deaf children responded more loquaciously to questions than they did to statements or expressions of ideas, and the children were unsuccessful in continuing topics of…

A study analyzed the dinner-table discourse in a Caucasian-American, upper-middle-class two-parent family with children aged seven (female) and eight (male) for evidence of how family narrative practices socialize children into family, social, and cultural membership. It is also proposed that discourse in families both indexes and constitutes…

Based on the notion that a dialectical perspective better represents the processes and tensions involved in family communication than do traditional models, an exploratory study examined the communication practices of two television families: the Huxtables of "The Cosby Show," and the Keatons of "Family Ties." The series were…

A detailed review of current research and state-of-the-art ideas concerning both communication processes and family functioning is presented in this collection of articles. The volume is organized around three sections. Part 1, "The Development of Family Communication Patterns," contains: (1) "Communication in Infancy"…