Children's speech act comprehension strategies and early literacy experiences

Abstract

Our previous research showed a developmental shift in young children's speech act processing, from more context-dependent to more lan guage-dependent strategies. To what extent is this shift related to early literacy experiences and knowledge? The first study examined the speech act comprehension of 64 three- and four-year-old subjects from a university preschool. Subjects were required to choose one of two paraphrases which most closely matched the pragmatic intention of a stimulus utterance. These stimulus forms were presented with puppets in a simulated preschool context previ ously shown to predispose children's interpretations of stimulus items toward request uptakes. Subjects were exposed to both grammatical and ungrammatical examples of a range of these request types. Dif ferences in literacy experience were identified by means of a parental questionnaire. All subjects discriminated pragmatic intention significantly more reliably on grammatical items than on ungrammatical ones, but children with more extensive experiences of literacy performed poorly on the ungrammatical input, regardless of age. A second study of 41 children investigated the links between their early concepts about literacy and speech act comprehension strategies. Performance on the speech act comprehension task was analysed by grouping subjects according to their performance on two separate measures of early concepts of literacy, Clay's Concepts About Print, and Downing's Linguistic Awareness in Reading Readiness, with age group confounded. Children on the higher ends of both literacy measures again experienced difficulty when confronted with ungrammatical input in the speech act comprehension task. Results of both studies are interpreted in the context of the develop ment of linguistic awareness, and within the larger framework of the development of metacognitive representational ability.