The emergence of illocutionary skills

Abstract

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.

Children's use of phonological information in ambiguity resolution: a view from Mandarin Chinese

“…whether the utterance expresses a request, a yes/no question, an offer, and so on) (Bara & Bucciarelli, 1998 ;Bernicot & Legros, 1987 ;Bucciarelli et al, 2003 ;Reeder, 1980). whether the utterance expresses a request, a yes/no question, an offer, and so on) (Bara & Bucciarelli, 1998 ;Bernicot & Legros, 1987 ;Bucciarelli et al, 2003 ;Reeder, 1980).…”

“…whether the utterance expresses a request, a yes/no question, an offer and so on) (Bara & Bucciarelli, 1998;Bernicot & Legros, 1987 ;Bucciarelli, Colle & Bara, 2003 ;Reeder, 1980). Given the fact that previous off-line judgement tasks failed to find a prosodic effect in children's resolution of structural ambiguities, we wanted to use this on-line task to maximize the chances of detecting Mandarin-speaking children's sensitivity to stress in resolving structural ambiguities.…”

Pragmatic failure and referential ambiguity when attorneys ask child witnesses “do you know/remember” questions.

“…For example, Shatz (1978a) found that among children as young as 19 months of age, only 9% responded literally to indirect speech acts by simply responding “Yes.” Indeed, Shatz (1978b) found that when a question could be interpreted as either a direct request for information or as an implied request for action, 19- to 34-month-old children preferentially interpreted the question as a request for action. Several studies have found that young children can be as responsive to indirect speech acts as direct speech acts, particularly when a conventional form is used (such as “Can you” or “Would you like to”) and the to-be-requested action is easily identified (Bara & Bucciarelli, 1998; Bucciarelli, Colle, & Bara, 2003; Reeder, 1980). …”

Locutionary, Illocutionary, Perlocutionary

“…Now, it has been experimentally established that children below the age of 7 are unable to attribute second-order beliefs and intentions (Perner and Winner 1985;Leekam and Prior 1994). The problem is that, in contrast, children below 3 attribute illocutionary forces to utterances on contextual grounds (Reeder 1978;Shatz 1978), and adapt their illocutionary acts to the addressee (Read and Cherry 1978;O'Neill 1996). These data indicate that children below 3 master the illocutionary dimension of the language use in spite of being unable to attribute second-, let alone fourth-, order intentions.…”