1. Development of communicative and pragmatic abilities
Aylin Küntay
Meeting 5
Language and Communicative Disorders

2. 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

3. 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

4. Precursors: ToM Understanding mental states
Understanding source of knowledge in other people
E.g., seeing leads to knowing

5. 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

6. 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)

7. 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: ….

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. For Thursday
Read Klinger et al. chapter on autistic disorder