Children's communicative development - bringing experimental pragmatics to the classroom

The development of language and communication skills is crucial for children's wellbeing and education outcomes. This Fellowship is about improving understanding of one aspect of this - how children learn pragmatic skills - and applying this understanding to practice.

When we communicate, we often mean far more than we say; this may be obvious when we are ironic, for example, but happens in more subtle ways in most instances of communication. This means that we are constantly making inferences about what the speaker means. These pragmatic skills are bound up with social, emotional and cognitive learning in children's development. In my doctoral research, I empirically investigated a particular type of pragmatic inference, known as an 'implicature'. For instance, if in answer to the question, 'did you meet his parents?', the speaker says, 'I met his mum', then the hearer infers that the speaker met only his mum (not his dad), by assuming that the speaker is fully informative; but if the question were 'why are you upset?', then the inferred meaning would be quite different.

I found that children are able to make these kind of implicature inferences at a younger age than often previously thought, from about 3 years, but, crucially, that children only have this competence in simple communicative situations, where the context supports the inference-making process. When children have to integrate social non-linguistic information into the inference, such as what the speaker knows or does not know, they struggle to do so even aged 6, in contrast to adults who are able to take into account all this different information. Furthermore, I found that children's pragmatic development is closely associated with their vocabulary and grammar, but did not see evidence that being monolingual or bilingual makes a difference at 3-5 years, even though bilinguals have smaller vocabularies in each language on average.

The Fellowship consists in three strands of activity.
1. Dialogue, application and impact - workshops on developmental pragmatics and reading inferences
I will create a network with education and psychology researchers to open a dialogue on two closely-related but to date separate lines of research, on developmental pragmatics and on inferences in reading comprehension. Through a day-long workshop we will identify commonalities in findings, avenues for combined research, and recommendations for classroom practice. This is important, especially for Early Years and Key Stage 1, as new requirements for teaching inference-making across primary school are mostly based on research on reading with Key Stage 2 children, while in Key Stage 1 the foundations for inference-making are also built through the oral language studied by developmental pragmaticians. A second workshop will bring together researchers with practitioners - teachers and teacher trainers - to engage in dialogue about their teaching of inference-making, to communicate the synthesised findings from the first workshop, and to identify routes to impact.

2. A systematic review article on the development of implicature inferences
I will enhance the thorough narrative literature review of my PhD by producing a systematic review and meta-analysis of children's development of implicature inferences. I aim to publish this as an article in an academic journal, and as an accessible summary in practitioner magazines.

3. Limited new research - an experimental study on pragmatic inferencing and perspective-taking
I will address a pressing question ensuing from my PhD: when children struggle with taking into account the speaker's perspective or knowledge, is it a particular problem with visual perspective-taking, or with social perspective-taking more generally? This will be achieved through an empirical study with 4- and 6-year-olds, in a task which combines making implicature inferences with taking another's perspective in social interaction.