Form and function in children's understanding of ironic utterances☆

How children comprehend speech acts and communicative gestures

Simple and complex deceits and ironies

The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship among age, first- and second-order Theory of Mind and the increasing ability of children to understand and produce different kinds of communicative acts – sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - expressed through linguistic and extralinguistic expressive means. To communicate means to modify an interlocutor's mental states (Grice, 1989), and pragmatics studies the inferential processes that are necessary to fill the gap, which often exists in human communication, between the literal meaning of a speaker’s utterance and what the speaker intends to communicate to the interlocutor. We administered brief video-clip stories showing different kinds of pragmatic phenomena – sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - and first- and second-order ToM tasks, to 120 children, ranging in age from 3 to 8 years. The results showed the existence of a trend of difficulty in children’s ability to deal with both linguistic and extralinguistic pragmatic tasks, from the simplest to the most difficult: sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts. A hierarchical regression analysis indicated that age plays a significant role in explaining children’s performance on each pragmatic task. Furthermore, the hierarchical regression analysis revealed that first-order ToM has a causal role in explaining children’s performance in handling sincere and deceitful speech acts, but not irony. We did not detect any specific role for second-order ToM. Finally, ToM only partially explains the observed increasing trend of difficulty in children’s pragmatic performance: the variance in pragmatic performance explained by ToM increases between sincere and deceitful communicative acts, but not between deceit and irony. The role of inferential ability in explaining the improvement in children’s performance across the pragmatic tasks investigated is discussed.

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Sincere, Deceitful, and Ironic Communicative Acts and the Role of the Theory of Mind in Childhood.

Done wrong or said wrong? Young children understand the normative directions of fit of different speech acts.

A psycholinguistic experiment elicits highly reliable judgements from young English-speaking children aged 2; 6–3; 0 about illocutionary force of utterances presented in controlled contexts. Puppet play simulated extralinguistic features judged capable of constituting felicity conditions upon the illocutionary acts Request and Offer. The experimental data bear upon two questions: (1) What set of features, linguistic and pragmatic, constitute cues for the discrimination of illocutionary force by young children? (2) What is the lower developmental bound of the emergence of discrimination of illocutionary force for Requests and Offers? While grasp of illocutionary force for Offers was well-established by 2; 6, discrimination skills for Requests probably continues to develop between 2; 6 and 3; 0. Relevant pragmatic features are explicated, and a model of the comprehension of illocutionary force proposed in the light of the results.

The emergence of illocutionary skills

Two experimental studies investigate the extent of 3- and 4-year-olds' relative dependence upon contextual and linguistic information as they discriminate between presentations of Requests from Offers, and Requests from Questions presented in contexts. Contexts are manipulated systematically, and quantity of linguistic information in the presentations is progressively reduced. While younger subjects' discrimination of each speech act appeared relatively unaffected by reduction of linguistic information, the older subjects' performance was relatively adversely affected. We consider a developmental shift in speech act comprehension strategy from an early more context-based approach to a later, more heavily text-dependent approach, perhaps linked to continuing development of linguistic awareness.

The Development of Young Children's Speech Act Comprehension: How Much Language is Necessary?.

This article reports several dilemmas that a team of university- and industry-based designers encountered as they collaborated on the design and development of a software program for teaching academic writing to intermediate English as a second or foreign language learners. The findings show that software design includes more than following a list of guidelines. Each step of the process introduces decision points as designers define a program’s purpose, content, and execution. Because many of those choices are equally valid within their own framework of values, some of these decision points create dilemmas for designers. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the effectiveness of educational software design by informing interested professionals about possible design dilemmas.

Dilemmas in Designing Multimedia Software for Learners of English as a Second or Foreign Language

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The emergence of illocutionary skills

The Development of Young Children's Speech Act Comprehension: How Much Language is Necessary?.

Dilemmas in Designing Multimedia Software for Learners of English as a Second or Foreign Language