The pervasive role of pragmatics in early language

Abstract

Language is a fundamentally social endeavor. Pragmatics is the study of how speakers and listeners use social reasoning to go beyond the literal meanings of words to interpret language in context. In this review, we take a pragmatic perspective on language development and argue for developmental continuity between early non-verbal communication, language learning, and linguistic pragmatics. We link phenomena from these different literatures by relating them to a computational framework (the rational speech act framework), which conceptualizes communication as fundamentally inferential and grounded in social cognition. The model specifies how different information sources (linguistic utterances, social cues, common ground) are combined when making pragmatic inferences. We present evidence in favor of this inferential view and review how pragmatic reasoning supports children’s learning, comprehension, and use of language.

Preschool‐Aged Children Jointly Consider Others’ Emotional Expressions and Prior Knowledge to Decide When to Explore

“…Collectively, these findings advance our understanding of how children learn from others. Building on abundant work that emphasizes the role of others’ speech, actions, and demonstrations in guiding early learning (e.g., Bohn & Frank, 2019; Bonawitz et al, 2011; Buchsbaum et al, 2011, 2015; Butler & Markman, 2012; Csibra & Gergely, 2009; Csibra & Shamsudheen, 2015; Gweon & Schulz, 2011; Gweon et al, 2010; Shneidman et al, 2016), a recent proposal has raised the possibility that children treat others’ emotional expressions as an important source of information (Wu et al, in press). By synthesizing perspectives from emotion research, social learning, and exploratory play, our work provides empirical support for the idea that young children use others’ emotion as information about the world (see also Dukes & Clément, 2019; Gergely & Király, 2019), taking a step toward a more comprehensive account of how we learn from others.…”

Theory Before the Test: How to Build High-Verisimilitude Explanatory Theories in Psychological Science

“…First, to the extent that cognitive capacities also figure in explanations in other subfields of psychology, Marr’s framework naturally extends to these domains. A few areas in which the approach has been fruitfully pursued include (a) social cognition, for instance, in social categorization ( Klapper et al, 2018 ), mentalizing or “theory of mind” ( Baker et al, 2009 ; Michael & MacLeod, 2018 ; Mitchell, 2006 ; Thagard & Kunda, 1998 ), causal attribution ( De Houwer & Moors, 2015 ), moral cognition ( Mikhail, 2008 ), signaling and communication ( Frank & Goodman, 2012 ; Moreno & Baggio, 2015 ), and social attachment ( Chumbley & Steinhoff, 2019 ); (b) cognitive development, for instance, in theory of mind ( Goodman et al, 2006 ), probabilistic and causal learning ( Bonawitz et al, 2014 ; Gopnik & Bonawitz, 2015 ), self-directed learning ( Gureckis & Markant, 2012 ), pragmatic communication ( Bohn & Frank, 2019 ), analogical processing ( Gentner, 1983 , 2010 ), and concept formation ( Carey, 2009 ; Kinzler & Spelke, 2007 ); and (c) cognitive evolution, for instance, in cognitive structures and architectures that aim to account for language, social cognition, reasoning and decision-making ( Barrett, 2005 ; Carruthers, 2006 ; Cosmides & Tooby, 1995 ; Fodor, 2000 ; Lieder & Griffiths, 2020 ; Marcus, 2006 ).…”

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

“…There is no unique cue to reference, however, that can be used across all situations 6 . Instead, referents can only be identified inferentially by reasoning about the speaker’s intentions 7 – 10 . That is, the child has to infer what the speaker is communicating about on the basis of information sources in the utterance’s social context.…”