Children’s reformulations during speech-language assessment

In speech and language therapy it is common to do an assessment of a child’s speech and language abilities. During the assessment, the child does not solely carry out the assigned task, but also does repair work to achieve intersubjectivity in order to perform well in the test activity. The aim of the present study was to investigate how children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) design and initiate repair during assessment. Sixteen children with DLD aged between 7;05 (7 years and 5 months) to 10;00 years were included. The data consist of video recordings of the children and a researcher made during the test activities, and conversation analysis is used to analyse the data. Findings show how the children initiate several kinds of repair during the test activities, with several types of reformulations presenting candidate understandings. The reformulations occurred just after the task-setting turn (TST), and they indicate that the children displayed an understanding of what was expected of them during the test activities. By using reformulations, the children thus revealed pragmatic skills and demonstrated competence in being a test taker. These findings may have clinical implications when assessing pragmatic skills.