Knowledge of pragmatics is an essential component of meaningful everyday communication and arguably a unique and elusive human ability that distinguishes human-to-human interactions not only from animal communication systems but even from the most advanced human-to-machine exchanges. It encompasses three areas of knowledge, all of which are at the interface of language and social interaction.
The first of these areas covers the social norms of communication including style and politeness, the observation of turn-taking norms and adherence to the Gricean maxims of quality, quantity, relevance and manner (Grice 1975).
The second area is what Sperber & Wilson (1986/1995) termed explicatures: From the listeners perspective, it involves the disambiguation of ambiguous expressions, the identification of the referents of pronouns and ellipsis and the clarification of vague and deictic terms.
Finally the third area is the inferring of the intended meaning of the speaker’s communication when Gricean maxims are infringed or the intended meaning is in some other way distinct from the literal, linguistic meaning. Common examples are irony, metaphorical language use, speech acts and implied messages.
What is common to these three areas is that they all require something more than lexical and morphosyntactic knowledge: They are to some extent culture-dependent and indeterminate in the sense that the same utterance may have entirely different pragmatic meanings depending on the linguistic and physical context, the epistemic states of the speaker and the listener or even the participants’ moods. The process of inference is also known to depend greatly on cognitive skills such as attentional control, working memory and mentalisation.
While for mature language users, the pragmatic inferential process is normally automatic and seemingly effortless, children often fail to make the inferences that an adult would make in the same communicative situation. Also, certain developmental and acquired communication disorders specifically affect pragmatic inference while leaving other language functions intact.
It is the interaction between the above cognitive and social skills and the emergence of pragmatic knowledge that the research group studies.
We explored the relationship between general cognitive abilities and the interpretation of ad-hoc implicatures in 3 to 8 year-old typically developing Hungarian-speaking children. The hypothesis we test is that young children’s difficulties with implicature derivation are rooted in their relatively low levels of general cognitive resources.
Ad-hoc implicatures are meaning components implied but not entailed by an utterance that arise with varying degrees of probability in different contexts. In the context of (1), for instance, (2) implies that Bob has only tried the bike but not the scooter.
Bob got a bike and a scooter for his birthday.
He’s already tried the bike.
In a situation where Bob has also tried the scooter, (2) is considered to be underinformative, since it fails to adhere to the Gricean maxim of quantity and is less informative than it could be. It has been noted in the literature on children’s language development that young children appear to be less sensitive to ad-hoc and scalar implicatures than adults. In one of the first experimental studies, Noveck (2001) found, for instance, that while adults tend to reject underinformative utterances such as Some elephants are mammals in a binary truth value judgement tasks, young children are much more likely to accept them, and the likelihood of acceptance decreases as children get older.
First, a series of increasingly simpler experimental procedures were developed. In all experiments, participants listened to a sentence and were shown a set of pictures, and made decisions as to the goodness of the match between the sentence and the picture(s). The sentences were statements with a clear semantic and a clear pragmatic meaning. The pictures were of three types: one depicting the semantic meaning, one depicting the pragmatic meaning and one depicting a scene different from both meanings. In the binary sentence-picture verification task, participants saw one picture at a time and had to decide whether the picture matched the sentence or not. The ternary sentence-picture verification task was the same except that participants were asked to give a three-way answer: perfect match, fair match or poor match. In the two-picture ordering task participants were shown two pictures at a time and had to put them in order of goodness of match with the sentence. Finally, the task was the same in the three-picture ordering tasks except that participants saw and were asked to rank all three pictures.
The tasks were completed by adult controls and three groups of children: 3-4 year-olds, 5-6 year-olds and 7-8 year-olds. None of the children gave adult-like answers in the binary sentence-picture verification task, and only 7-8 year-olds were indistinguishable from adult controls in the ternary sentence-picture verification task, all but 3-4 year-olds showed adult performance in the three-picture ordering task, and even 3-4 year-olds derived the implicature in the two-picture ordering task. The results of the experiments indicate that young children’s ability to derive implicatures depends on task difficulty.
Second, to obtain further evidence for the relationship between executive functioning, intention attribution and implicature derivation, another group of children participated in the ternary sentence-picture verification task where they were also tested for working memory (Corsi Blocks Task), cognitive flexibility (Dimensional Card Change Sort Task), attentional control (Children’s Stroop Task) and intention attribution task. Regression models revealed that performance at these tests was a significant predictor of the likelihood of children interpreting underinformative sentences in an adult-like manner, and it was a better predictor than chronological age.
We conclude from the results, that (a) implicature derivation is affected by the availability of cognitive resources and the ease of intention attribution but (b) even very young children are sensitive to pragmatic meaning provided that the general cognitive load of the task is undemanding.
A pragmatikai kompetencia és a nem-nyelvi kognitív erőforrások összefüggései
Even 3-4 years-olds understand implicatures if the cognitive load of the task is reduced
Children’s understanding of hints and speech acts develops relatively slowly compared to their comprehension of truth-functional propositions. Our study looks at two alternative hypotheses as explanations for this delay. Verbuk & Shultz (2010) contend that children’s difficulty has to do with the complex linguistic structures used to perform speech acts. Bernicot & Laval (2004), in contrast, argue that it is the inferential process involved in indirect hint and speech act comprehension that causes the difficulty.
We conducted an experiment involving children between 3 and 6 years of age. Participants were shown brief animated stories in which one character dropped a hint. The children then had to choose from a set of four pictures the one depicting the intended consequence of the hint. The hints varied by syntactic complexity (simple sentence, complex sentence, no sentence) and by inferential complexity (conventional request vs. indirect hint). In addition to the speech act comprehension task, the children completed a nonverbal stroop task, a verbal working memory task and the TROG test (a test of knowledge of grammar).
The results show that the degree of inferential complexity has a significant effect on children’s comprehension of speech acts: they are more successful in interpreting conventional requests than indirect hints. Moreover, even though the grammatical complexity of the sentence carrying the conventional request or the indirect hint does not directly affect the comprehension of the speech act, a strong positive correlation was found between children's success rate at the speech act task and their TROG performance.
Beszédaktusok megértése óvodáskorban
Linguistic versus inferential abilities in children's comprehension of speech acts
The comprehension of ironic-sarcastic intent appears relatively late and its appearance coincides with the appearance of evidence for metapragmatic awareness We investigated the effects of metapragmatic training on the recognition of ironic and deceitful speaker intent. Typically developing preschool children were tested in a story comprehension task. Each story included a true (literal), a false (deceit) and an ironic statement. The task was to choose the intended interpretation of these statements from three options. After completing the test, some of the children participated in a metapragmatic training programme (they were taught to recognize irony) and the rest of the children acted as controls. After the training period, both groups were tested again using the original story comprehension test.
The results revealed that irony comprehension improved dramatically in the training group but not in the control group; however, deceit recognition declined in the training group but not in the control group. An error analysis further revealed that on an individual level there was no negative correlation between irony performance and deceit recognition performance, and the decline in deceit recognition was in part due to errors where the deceitful statement was interpreted as literally true. We therefore conclude that the realisation that speaker intentions play a role in the comprehension of non-literal language is an important first step – that can be taught – in pragmatic development but identifying those intentions remains a challenge.
Az irónia és a hazugság kommunikatív komponenseinek felismerése 5–10 éves korban
The project assesses children's ability to infer the intended non-literal meaning of conventional metaphors and novel expressions from the linguistic context. The children listened to short stories ending in either a conventional metaphor or a novel expression. The target sentences are preceded by either a rich context suggestive of the intended interpretation of the target expressions or by a neutral context providing no cues. The children had to choose from among three pictures (one depicting the literal meaning of words of the target expression, one depicting the intended or metaphorical meaning and one depicting a scene different from both meanings) the one best matching the story. (See Demos for an example in Hungarian.) The results show that 3-4 year olds do not use successfully the context to infer the intended non-literal meaning but 5-6 year olds do, although only to a limited extent. Both the younger and the older age groups seem to rely on a familiar keyword: they tend to choose a meaning depiction containing an element that they can link to a familiar word in the target expression.
