Children Build on Pragmatic Information in Language Acquisition

Abstract

Pragmatic information is integral to language use for both adults and children. Children rely on contextually shared knowledge to communicate before they can talk: they make use of gesture to convey their first meanings and then add words to gestures. Like adults, they build on joint attention, physical copresence, and conversational copresence both as they acquire and as they use language. This can be seen in children's early communication, in their first inferences about word and utterance meanings, and in their ability to make use of appropriate contextual information as they learn how to interpret and produce terms like big or long compared to full, almost and only, and all and some.

Word Meanings Evolve to Selectively Preserve Distinctions on Salient Dimensions

“…For example, the relational nature of gradable adjectives such as "big" means that the contexts in which they are learned and used will tend to highlight dimensions of relations between objects as well as intrinsic dimensions (Clark & Amaral, 2010;Gentner & Kurtz, 2005;Sandhofer & Smith, 2001). The results show that attentional learning effects amplified over cultural transmission lead to a lexicon that underspecifies preferentially across dimensions that are habitually less salient during learning and use.…”

Ad-hoc Implicature in Preschool Children

“…These findings are surprising with respect to the broader developmental literature for at least three reasons: first, there is a large and consistent body of evidence that children learn new words by relying on their understanding of the goals and intentions of others; that is, they learn words "pragmatically" (Baldwin, 1993;Bloom, 2002;Clark & Amaral, 2010;Frank, Goodman, & Tenenbaum, 2009;Tomasello & Akthar, 1995). If children do in fact use pragmatic reasoning to learn new words, why can't they use that knowledge to compute SI inferences?…”

How Do Children Acquire Early Grammar and Build Multiword Utterances? A Corpus Study of French Children Aged 2 to 4

“…As children begin to use more grammatical types, the need to use pragmatic words decreases, which, together with the fact that these expressions can lead to very short utterances, explains the impact on MLU. We know that pragmatic knowledge plays a role in early language acquisition as Veneziano (, ), Clark and Amaral (), and Herr‐Israel and McCune () pointed out, but this was partially captured by our distributional part‐of‐speech tagger.…”