ERIC Number: EJ1351315
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022-Nov
Pages: 28
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: EISSN-1469-7602
Pragmatic, Linguistic and Cognitive Factors in Young Children's Development of Quantity, Relevance and Word Learning Inferences
Wilson, Elspeth; Katsos Napoleon
Journal of Child Language, v49 n6 p1065-1092 Nov 2022
To better understand the developmental trajectory of children's pragmatic development, studies that examine more than one type of implicature as well as associated linguistic and cognitive factors are required. We investigated three- to five-year-old English-speaking children's (N = 71) performance in ad hoc quantity, scalar quantity and relevance implicatures, as well as word learning by exclusion inferences, using a sentence-to-picture-matching story-based task. Children's pragmatic abilities improved with age, with word learning by exclusion acquired first, followed by relevance and ad hoc quantity implicatures, and finally scalar quantity implicatures. In an exploratory analysis (with a subset of the data N = 58), we found that structural language knowledge was a predictor of pragmatic performance (but no evidence for an association with socioeconomic status or Theory of Mind, controlling for structural language). We discuss reasons why this developmental pattern emerges with reference to linguistic and extra-linguistic properties of these inferences.
Descriptors: Vocabulary Development, Pragmatics, Preschool Children, Age Differences, Knowledge Level, Predictor Variables, Child Development, Linguistics, Inferences, English
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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