Abstract
The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship among age, first- and second-order Theory of Mind and the increasing ability of children to understand and produce different kinds of communicative acts – sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts – expressed through linguistic and extralinguistic expressive means. To communicate means to modify an interlocutor’s mental states (Grice, 1989), and pragmatics studies the inferential processes that are necessary to fill the gap, which often exists in human communication, between the literal meaning of a speaker’s utterance and what the speaker intends to communicate to the interlocutor. We administered brief video-clip stories showing different kinds of pragmatic phenomena – sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - and first- and second-order ToM tasks, to 120 children, ranging in age from 3 to 8 years. The results showed the existence of a trend of difficulty in children’s ability to deal with both linguistic and extralinguistic pragmatic tasks, from the simplest to the most difficult: sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts. A hierarchical regression analysis indicated that age plays a significant role in explaining children’s performance on each pragmatic task. Furthermore, the hierarchical regression analysis revealed that first-order ToM has a causal role in explaining children’s performance in handling sincere and deceitful speech acts, but not irony. We did not detect any specific role for second-order ToM. Finally, ToM only partially explains the observed increasing trend of difficulty in children’s pragmatic performance: the variance in pragmatic performance explained by ToM increases between sincere and deceitful communicative acts, but not between deceit and irony. The role of inferential ability in explaining the improvement in children’s performance across the pragmatic tasks investigated is discussed.
Highlights
Pragmatic ability refers to the use of language (Levinson, 1983) and other expressive means, such as non-verbal/extralinguistic means, i.e., gestures and body movements (Bara, 2010), to convey a specific meaning in a given context
The scores obtained by each age group on the pragmatic and Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks are summarized in Tables 1 and 2
The analyses showed that within both the model including first-order ToM (Step 2) and the model comprising second-order ToM (Step 3), R2 only partially follows the trend of increasing difficulty exhibited by children in solving pragmatic problems, when considering both linguistic and extralinguistic tasks, i.e., first-order ToM, second-order ToM
Summary
Pragmatic ability refers to the use of language (Levinson, 1983) and other expressive means, such as non-verbal/extralinguistic means, i.e., gestures and body movements (Bara, 2010), to convey a specific meaning in a given context Interesting examples of such ability are indirect speech acts, meaning acts through which the speaker communicates more than is literally said to the listener (Searle, 1975); deceitful communicative acts, meaning intentional attempts to manipulate. At around one year of age children start to understand and use direct speech acts, meaning utterances that express literally and exactly what the speaker intends to say (Searle, 1975), in order to communicate with another person (Garvey, 1984). Children become able to handle indirect speech acts early on in their development. Reeder (1980), for example, showed that starting from 2;6 years of age, children understand well, in an adequate context, that direct utterances like ‘I want you to do that’ and indirect requests like ‘Would you mind doing that?’ have the same conventional communicative meaning (see Bernicot and Legros, 1987). Bucciarelli et al (2003) showed that, starting from 2;6 years of age, children understand direct and conventional forms of indirect speech acts (“Would you mind” “Do you know?”, etc) well, and that such ability increases with age (see Bosco and Bucciarelli, 2008)
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