A study of non-native children's acquisition of communicative competence examined the child's construction of rules of conversation in the second language. The linguistic devices that children use to link up their utterances with those of another speaker, i.e., cohesion-creating devices that create textual unity, were focused upon. Repetition, one device that links utterances across speakers, and the interrelations among repetition and mechanisms that allocate turns in conversation were examined. These include both attention-getting devices ("look") and response-getting devices (questions). Two female children, four and five years old, who were living in the United States while their fathers were studying or visiting, were examined. The children were videotaped in a structured play setting with an investigator. Repetition without prosodic change is a less effective means of turn allocation than question-answer sequences or attention directors because it does not directly pass the conversation back to the other speaker. Two effects that a repetition without prosodic change can have on a conversation are illustrated, and conversational exchanges and diagrams illustrating communication devices are presented. (SW)