Acquisition of Pragmatics

How do children learn to bridge the gap between the literal, semantic meaning of words and the intended, pragmatic meaning of an utterance? The acquisition of pragmatics is the topic of an experimental field of study that investigates this question. According to an influential pragmatic theory proposed by the philosopher Paul Grice, communication is a collaborative effort governed by specific rules (or “maxims”). A collaborative speaker is expected to be as informative as required by the purpose of the communicative exchange (maxim of Quantity), truthful (maxim of Quality), relevant (maxim of Relation), and unambiguous (maxim of Manner). A collaborative listener makes inferences about the speaker’s intentions based on the assumption that the speaker is being cooperative and following the conversational rules. Later pragmatic theories such as Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s relevance theory have offered important alternatives to the Gricean framework but share several foundational assumptions with Grice’s approach, including the idea that human communication involves representing the speaker’s beliefs and goals. Whether young children are capable of making such inferences about the speaker’s mental states and how aspects of this ability might develop are the most important questions in the study of children’s pragmatic development. For many years, it was believed that children before the age of five or six were not able to entertain pragmatic inferences about the speaker’s intentions or knowledge state. However, more recent theoretical advancements in the semantics-pragmatics interface and the development of new methodological tools have led to a reconsideration of older findings. It appears increasingly likely that the skills required for pragmatic reasoning are in place from a very young age, but the process of applying those skills in communication is effortful and highly task dependent, and continues to develop until late childhood. This article focuses on prominent work on the acquisition of children’s pragmatic abilities in three areas that have generated a considerable body of data: Reference, Implicature, and Figurative Language.