Abstract
If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, ‘I have a cough’, the requesting child must make a ‘relevance inference’ to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive skills relate to relevance inferencing. In addition, we asked whether children’s lab-based pragmatic performance relates to children’s parent-assessed pragmatic language skills. We tested 3.5- to 4-year-old speakers of British English (Study 1: N = 40, Study 2: N = 32). Children were presented with video-recorded vignettes ending with an utterance requiring a relevance inference, for which children made a forced choice. Study 1 measured children’s Theory of Mind, their sentence comprehension and their real-world knowledge and found that only real-world knowledge retained significance in a regression analysis with children’s relevance inferencing as the outcome variable. Study 2 then manipulated children’s world-knowledge through priming but found this did not improve children’s performance on the relevance inferencing task. Study 2 did, however, reveal a significant correlation between children’s relevance inferencing and a measure of morpho-syntactic production. In both studies parents rated their children’s pragmatic language usage in daily life, which was found to relate to performance in our lab-based relevance inferencing task. This set of studies is the first to empirically demonstrate that lab-based measures of relevance inferencing are reflective of children’s pragmatic abilities ‘in the wild’. There was no clear association between relevance inferencing and Theory of Mind. There was mixed evidence for the role of formal language, which should be further investigated. Finally, real-world knowledge was indeed associated with relevance inferencing but future experimental work is required to test causal relations.
Highlights
Children encounter indirect use of language on a daily basis
Our main research question was whether individual differences in relevance inferencing can be explained by children’s Theory of Mind, their
Since we had not found a relationship between sentence comprehension and relevance inferencing in Study 1, we explored whether there might be a relationship between relevance inferencing and a different measure of formal language; in Study 2, we replaced the ‘Sentence Structures’ sub-test with the ‘Word Structure’ sub-test of the CELF-P, which measures expressive morpho-syntax, a domain in which there is rapid growth in this age group
Summary
Imagine a child asks a friend to play football with him and the friend replies that he has a cough To interpret this reply as an indirect refusal, the child must infer that ‘I have a cough’ is somehow relevant to the current ‘question under discussion’ in the conversation and use this to determine the implied meaning With a more goaldirected design (i.e. giving a puppet what she/he wants), Schulze et al (2013: Study 3) found that even at 36 months, children were able to compute the required relevance inferences and successfully interpreted others’ communicative acts 66% of the time overall (see Schulze & Buttelmann, 2021, regarding the trajectory up until and including 5 years of age). In Schulze et al.’s (2013: Study 3) paradigm, children saw vignettes of two puppets engaging in a short dialogue, as in (1) below: Abbot-Smith et al
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