The phenomenon of repetition is the presence of two items in a dialogue, employed with a certain
temporal contiguity by two different locutors or by the same locutor for one possible dialogical goal.
In particular, dialogical repetition (i.e. children’s repetition of an adult item) is believed to be an
important strategy for acquiring lexical entries, morphological and syntactic structures (Bazzanella
1996). On the contrary, monological repetition (i.e. repetition of children’s symbols) has not
a specifi c morphological or syntactic value but is apparently instance of copying and is supposed to
disappear when the child acquires his/her fi rst complex utterances. The present study focuses on
the role of monological repetition in pre-school children’s acquisition of syntactic structures. The
main assumption is that also this type of repetition could be involved in the process of analyzing
and rebuilding language, especially in the transition from simple to complex utterances. Expanding
on research by Slobin (1985) and Cresti & Moneglia (1996), we have defi ned monological
repetition as the repetition of children’s symbols between different turns of the child or within the
same turn. We transcribed utterances from 50 children, aged 2 to 4 years (subdivided into fi ve age
bands, with 10 children in each). We applied the Prosodic Method (Moneglia 1997) to identify
utterances and categorize repetition categories (Bazzanella 1996). We examined both the simple
and the complex utterances and identifi ed four functional categories of monological repetition :
1) lexical refi nement ; 2) expansion of the utterance ; 3) syntactic complexity ; 4) morphology. The
results suggest that the children use the categories in a selective mode, according to their age. The
2 years old children mostly use the lexical refi nement function, while children aged from 3 to 4
seem to prefer the other types of repetition (i.e. expansion of the utterance, syntactic complexity
and morphology). We may conclude that monological repetition is a strategy for acquiring both
dialogical ability, which is present from the very beginning of language, and syntactic structures,
which appear late in development
