Medizin- und Gesundheitsrecht

10. Components of pragmatic ability and children’s pragmatic language development

“…Functionalist models have placed at the forefront an emphasis on what children are trying to communicate in naturalistic settings rather than maintaining a strict distinction between language form, meaning, and use (cf. Bates 1976;Bates and MacWhinney 1982;Nelson 1981;Prutting 1982;Ninio and Snow 1996;Perkins 2007;Verscheuren 1999). Prominent among authors who consider pragmatics from a clinical or neuropsychological standpoint is the viewpoint that pragmatics quickly extends beyond the realm of language structure and linguistics, and involves knowledge that is more aptly viewed as social, cultural, cognitive, or even sensorimoter (Adams 2005;Fujiki and Brinton 2009;Ninio and Snow 1996;Perkins 2007).…”

“…That a child's language use is influenced by growth in social-cognitive knowledge is well recognized (e.g., Bates et al 1979;Faerch and Kasper 1984;Schiefelbusch and Pickar 1984;Smith and Leinonen 1992;Ninio and Snow 1996;O'Neill 1996O'Neill , 2007Thompson 1996;Verschueren 1999;Abbeduto and Short-Meyerson 2002;Tomasello, 2003) and reflected in communicative competence model approaches (Gumperz and Hymes 1964;Hymes 1972) and approaches that view language use and pragmatics as social competence (Prutting 1982). The interplay between social-cognitive knowledge and language use has been the topic of much research activity, especially with respect to one particular area of social-cognitive knowledge, namely, children's developing understanding of mind.…”

“…Indeed, pragmatics is argued, not infrequently, to be a process of social development and part of children's enculturation (Ninio and Snow 1996). Pragmatics has also been argued to be a component of social competence (Goffman 1981;Prutting 1982;Gallagher 1991b).…”