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 Belief believe, suppose know, expect doubt, suspect Action hit, grab accept search Basic Emotions/Physiology love, like, enjoy hate, dislike, fear hunger, thirst Desire want, desire wish, hope ought, should A scheme for depicting belief-desire psychological reasoning (adapted from Bartsch & Wellman, 1995)

Pragmatics Knowing how to use language in context-appropriate 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 topics also develops

Conversational repairs monitor partner’s miscomprehension and 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. 2-year-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 communication Monologic conversations Failure to differentiate between literal and non-literal 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