Development of
communicative and pragmatic
abilities
Aylin Küntay
Meeting 5
Language and Communicative
Disorders
Communicative competence
• vs. linguistic competence: mastery of
•
•
phonology, syntax, and semantics
Hymes (1972): “we have to account for the
fact that a normal child acquires knowledge
of sentences, not only as grammatical, but
also as appropriate. He or she acquires
competence as to when to speak, when not,
and as to what to talk about with whom,
when, where, in what manner.”
skill in adapting linguistic competence to the
social and communicative demands of the
situation
Mutual knowledge (common
ground); Clark and Marshall 1981
• Community membership
– KUAIS
• Physical copresence
– Someone in the room or outside
• Linguistic copresence
– I met your mother yesterday. She…
• Indirect copresence
– Can be inferred to be known as a result of being
physically or linguistically copresent
Precursors: ToM
• Understanding mental states
• Understanding source of knowledge in
other people
– E.g., seeing leads to knowing
Child’s theory of mind
• Piaget: children under the age of 7 cannot
distinguish clearly between the properties
of mental events and physical events
– cannot engage in belief/desire reasoning
– ascribe animate properties (e.g., intentions)
to inanimate objects
• clouds move because they want to
• More recent developmental work:
preschool children start to employ some
sort of belief/desire reasoning, but
there are some limitations
Belief-desire reasoning
Perception
• see, hear, smell
• touch, feel
Basic Emotions/Physiology
•love, like, enjoy
•hate, dislike, fear
•hunger, thirst
Belief
•believe, suppose
•know, expect
•doubt, suspect
Desire
•want, desire
•wish, hope
•ought, should
Action
•hit, grab
•accept
•search
A scheme for depicting belief-desire psychological reasoning
(adapted from Bartsch & Wellman, 1995)
Pragmatics
• Knowing how to use language in contextappropriate ways
– The sun is bright today
• A: Close the curtain!
• B: Let’s go out to the beach.
• C: ….
Pragmatics
• In a pragmatic analysis, every utterance
has 3 aspects (Austin, Grice, Searle)
– locutionary act: grammatical form of the
utterance
– illocutionary force: the intent of the
speaker to accomplish some goal, such as
informing, requesting, promising, etc.
– perlocutionary effect: the effect that the
utterance has on the listener-- how they
respond to the illocutionary force of the
speaker’s utterance
Requests
• Bates: protoimperatives (one type of early
illocutionary act)
– use adults to get out of reach objects
• two-word utterances such as my rabbit, more
swing, mummy read, no ride
– many early utterances have the IF of requests of
goods and services
• as children grow older and linguistically more
sophisticated, interactants demand clearer
articulation of desires, greater politeness,
greater awareness of status differences
Requests: Control Acts
• Early requests are direct: bare imperatives
•
such as in sit, more
Ervin-Tripp: indirect requests such as ‘Would
you like to play doctor?’ and ‘You could give
me one’ develop later
– politeness forms: addressing the preferences or
the ability of the hearer, rather than making a
request of what is wanted
– 4-year-olds tend to use polite forms such as `Can
I have…’ when they are not sure of the listener’s
compliance
– use a bare imperative when compliance is
assumed
– hints-- inexplicit directives-- are late to develop
Topic relatedness (conversational
coherence)
• Longitudinal study of adult-child discourse by
•
Bloom
19-23 months: many adjacent utterances, but
most are not contingent on the adult’s topic
– contingent utterances are those that share the same
topic with the preceding utterance and add info to it
– children at this age period have a lot of semantic
and syntactic knowledge but not enough
conversational skills
• 35-38 months: not as many adjacent
utterances, but many are contingent
– the ability to initiate new conversational
Conversational repairs
• monitor partner’s miscomprehension and
•
•
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make a retry-- repetition or rephrasal
around 12 months, children show a tendency
to repair by repeating their original utterance,
or augmenting it gesturally or with vocal
emphasis
by about 16 months, children do rephrasals
by keeping the same communicative intent
but changing the grammatical form
24 month old children treat their mothers not
as omniscient, but as communicative partners
who might need more info
Perspetive taking
• Shatz & Gelman: looked at the differences in
the speech of 4-year-olds to adults vs. 2year-olds
– to 2-year-olds, they used shorter and simpler
sentences
– code-switching according to the conversational
partner
• Referential communication tasks
– being able to package the info in a way that takes
into account the perceptual and informational
status of the listener
– shows development throughout preschool ages
– need to take into account children´s developing
theory of mind
Potential pragmatic impairments
• Lack or abnormal use of nonverbal
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•
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communication
Monologic conversations
Failure to differentiate between literal and nonliteral meaning
Failure to understand indirect implications
Autism often considered to be a theory of mind
impairment or a pragmatic deficit
For Thursday
• Read Klinger et al. chapter on autistic
disorder