Abstract

The study is concerned with the communicative function of Korean mothers' Clarification Requestes(CR) utterances. The current understanding of CR utterances in that mothers clarify the children's obscure or misunderstood utterdn by producing CR utterances. According to this "repairing" view, the main purpose for mothers to produce CR utterances is to smooth the communication with their children by correcting troubled communicative exchanges. The contention of this essay is that this "repair thesis" of CR utterances does not suitably account for their communicative function in the Korean mother-child interaction. The essay rather emphasizes the psychosocial underpinnings of korean mothers' CR communication. Four middle class mother and child dyads were drawn: two from Seoul, Korea and two from Edmonton, Canada. The participating children were all 4 year old boys. 15 sessions of 30 minute video -tapings were made in their home environment. The data were analyzed to determine the psychosocial dynamics of CR utterances. The Korean mothers tended to produce more CR types of utterances than their Canadian counterparts. This observation could not be interpreted according to the repair thesis. First of all, in both groups of mothers, the majority of CR utterances occurred in contexts wherein the childern's utterances were clear in their meaning and intention, therefore there was no need to issue a clarification process. Secondly, most CR utterances tended to result in thematically redundant turns between the mothers and the children, and no function to correct or smooth troubled communication was observed. An alternative perspective argued that the Korean mothers' "hesitating" view of the children's communicative "reciprocity potential" is responsible for their frequent us of CR utterances. And this culture-specific psychosocial assumption of the mothers and the corresponding communicative patterns function to socialize the children into a specific view of social relationship, showing how to organize this social relationship in a communicative context. An emphasis was placed upon an intergrated view of mother-child communication and socialization process.