This paper examines the process and mechanism of conversational repair in spoken Hong Kong Cantonese. Levelt calls for accounts of conversational repair from diverse languages; this paper helps test his supposition that “the organization of repair is quite invariant across languages and cultures” (1989: 497). The paper also raises the hypothesis that personal and contextual factors are crucial variables which determine which type of repair will be socially acceptable (and therefore prominent) in a particular conversational setting.