ABSTRACT
Sound play has been discussed in terms of the vocal/verbal activity of a single speaker by Jakobson (1968) and Weir (1962). More recently it has been described in dialogic contexts between young children (Keenan and Klein, 1975; Garvey, 1977b). In these exchanges, children pay attention to the phonological shape of one another's utterances and repeat or modify slightly a sequence of sounds just produced. These sequences, which may be referentially meaningless, are nonetheless textually cohesive in that utterances relate, by similarity in phonological shape, to each other. In addition, Keenan and Klein (1975) have pointed out that sound play is coherent on a social level since it constitutes a single speech event.
