Development Of Pragmatic Abilities Research Articles

Literature Enhances Communication Skills: A Comprehensive Review

Many non-native and native speakers all around the world have proven that English is an international language. It is sometimes referred to as the global language since it is the primary means of communication across countries. In our nation, the usage of English as a common language plays an essential role in education. English learners must place a strong emphasis on the use of communication. The ultimate goal of language instruction is to improve communication skills. Pragmatics is the method in which meaning is transferred through communicating, and linguistic skill is regarded as an instrument for communication. Pragmatic competence is the capacity to comprehend and communicate meanings that are more correct and acceptable for the cultural and social contexts in which communication takes place. Even though English is used at many levels of communication, the speakers must be familiar with a variety of pragmatic components to create coherency and the capacity to react in a variety of scenarios. As a result, one of the key aims in the field of education should be the development of pragmatic ability and also help for future understanding.

Children with hearing impairment and early cochlear implant: A pragmatic assessment

Extensive research has demonstrated the benefits of cochlear implants (CI) in contributing to improve the linguistic skills of children with hearing impairment; however, few studies have focused on the development of pragmatic ability and its relationship with age of implantation. Pragmatics is the ability to use language in different contexts and its development has crucial implications, e.g., social inclusion and professional attainments. In this study, we conducted a comprehensive assessment of pragmatic ability using the Language Pragmatic Abilities (APL Medea), a battery composed by five different tasks: Comprehension of Metaphors, Implicit meaning, Comics, Situations and Colors Game (a perspective taking task). Eighteen children with early CI, belonging to 3 different age groups (6; 11–7; 11, 8; 0–8; 11 and 9; 0–9; 11 years-old), and twenty-four children with typical development (Control Group) participated to the study. We also investigated how the precocity of CI, i.e., age of first implantation, may affect the pragmatic development.Globally, children with CI obtained lower scores in the APL Medea battery than typically hearing children. However, focusing on the Medea tasks separately, children with CIs differed from their hearing peers only in Comics and Colors Game tasks. Finally, age of implantation was a moderate but significant predictor of pragmatic performance.

Demonstrative Reference and Cognitive Space: A Memory Game on Mandarin-Speaking Children

The development of pragmatic ability is an essential topic in language acquisition, among which demonstratives are significant to reflect human’s cognition of the relation between language and the environment. The purpose of this research is to investigate the acquisition of spatial demonstratives “zhe” (this) and “na” (that) of Mandarin-speaking children through experimental design (different tool use, e.g. participants pointed at the objects with their finger or a laser pen), exploring the influence of perceptual distance on children’s choice of spatial demonstratives. Through comparison with adults’ data, results supported the view that 5- to 6-year-old children have already developed adult-like cognitive space when it comes to the use of spatial demonstratives, which produced an effect on the use of spatial demonstratives, proving speaker’s subjective involvement in choosing the proximal or distal demonstrative in the process of communication, and rendering more evidence on children’s early development of pragmatic ability.

Guess What? Comparing Ad-hoc and Scalar Implicatures in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Guess What? Comparing Ad-hoc and Scalar Implicatures in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

PRAGMATIC ABILITIES OF PUPILS WITH MILD INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES

The research analyses characteristics of pragmatic abilities of storytelling of pupils with mild intellectual disabilities (MID), in the light of vocabulary characteristics, grammar structure and substantive structure of a story, considering their age and gender. The sample consists of 60 pupils with MID, aged 7 to 9, who attend special school. Child’s pragmatic abilities are assessed with The Storytelling Test. The research results reveal considerable progress of the older group in vocabulary, whereas the progress in grammatical and substantive structure was less substantial. When comparing achievements of pupils with MID according to the vocabulary, grammatical and substantive story structure, no gender differences are determined. A comparison of pragmatic abilities of younger and older groups of pupils with MID with the norms for peers with typical development shows minor deviation of the younger group. The research results reveal characteristics of pragmatic abilities of pupils with MID and can provide insights to speech therapists, teachers, special education teachers and counsellors when considering profiles of individuals that are taken as a basis for designing intervention programs. By implementing such program, we would encourage development of pragmatic abilities of pupils, thus affecting their academic achievements, communication competency and social skills.

Second language pragmatic ability: Individual differences according to environment

The aims of this paper are to review research literature on the role that the second language (L2) and foreign language (FL) environments actually play in the development of learners’ target language (TL) pragmatic ability, and also to speculate as to the extent to which individual factors can offset the advantages that learners may have by being in the L2 context while they are learning. The paper starts by defining pragmatics and by problematizing this definition. Then, attention is given to research literature dealing with the learning of pragmatics in an L2 context compared to an FL context. Next, studies on the role of pragmatic transfer are considered, with subsequent attention given to the literature on the incidence of pragmatic transfer in FL as opposed to L2 contexts. Finally, selected studies on the role of motivation in the development of pragmatic ability are examined. In the discussion section, a number of pedagogical suggestions are offered: the inclusion of pragmatics in teacher development, the use of authentic pragmatics materials, motivating learners to be more savvy about pragmatics, and supporting learners in accepting or challenging native-speaker norms. Suggestions as to further research in the field are also offered.

Development of communication skills in Finnish pre-school children examined by the Children's Communication Checklist (CCC)

The communication skills of typically developing Finnish-speaking children between three and six years of age were examined using the Children's Communication Checklist (CCC). The differences between the boys and girls were also investigated. Results showed that the performance of the three-year-old children differed on the Speech subscale of the CCC compared to the five-year-old and six-year-old children and on the Syntax, Coherence and Use of Context subscales from the six-year-old children. Four-year-old children differed from the six-year-olds on the Syntax and Coherence subscales, and the five-year-olds differed from the six-year-olds on the Rapport subscale. Boys performed similarly to girls except on the Interests scale where the boys' performance was poorer. The CCC was effective in evaluating typical communication skills in pre-school children, and it can be used to investigate pragmatic skills in children as young as three years of age. As the development of pragmatic abilities may develop differently across languages and cultures, studies about children's pragmatic development in different languages and cultural backgrounds are needed to identify if there is a universal developmental pattern of communication, as well as features that are specific to a given culture and to a given language.

Why children aren't universally successful with quantification

This paper explores preschooler's knowledge of the linguistic principles (syntactic, semantic and pragmatic) regulating the interaction between universally quantified noun phrases and negation. Previous work has shown that 5-year-olds differ systematically from adults in the way they interpret sentences containing these elements (Musolino 1998; Musolino et al. 2000). On the basis of these results, Musolino et al. conclude that the grammar of 5-year-olds generates only a subset of the interpretations available in the adult grammar. We present here a series of experiments whose results challenge this conclusion. First, we demonstrate that under certain contextual conditions, 5-year-olds can be shown to access the same range of interpretations which characterize the adult system. Second, we show that while 5-year-olds do not differ from adults grammatically, their command of the pragmatic principles associated with the use of quantified statements is much more fragile than that of adults. We further suggest that children's immature pragmatic abilities is what gave rise to Musolino et al.'s findings in the first place. In doing so, we tie together research on grammatical development with a growing body of work on the development of pragmatic abilities and sentence processing in young children (Noveck 2001; Papafragou and Musolino 2003; Trueswell et al. 1999; Hurewitz et al. 2001). Finally, we show that our results have interesting methodological implications for the study of grammatical development.

Practitioner review: the assessment of language pragmatics.

The assessment of pragmatics expressed in spoken language is a central issue in the evaluation of children with communication impairments and related disorders. A developmental approach to assessment has remained problematic due to the complex interaction of social, linguistic, cognitive and cultural influences on pragmatics. A selective review and critique of current formal and informal testing methods and pragmatic analytic procedures. Formal testing of pragmatics has limited potential to reveal the typical pragmatic abnormalities in interaction but has a significant role to play in the assessment of comprehension of pragmatic intent. Clinical assessment of pragmatics with the pre-school child should focus on elicitation of communicative intent via naturalistic methods as part of an overall assessment of social communication skills. Assessments for older children should include a comprehensive investigation of speech acts, conversational and narrative abilities, the understanding of implicature and intent as well as the child's ability to employ contextual cues to understanding. Practical recommendations are made regarding the choice of a core set of pragmatic assessments and elicitation techniques. The practitioner's attention is drawn to the lack of the usual safeguards of reliability and validity that have persisted in some language pragmatics assessments. A core set of pragmatic assessment tools can be identified from the proliferation of instruments in current use. Further research is required to establish clearer norms and ranges in the development of pragmatic ability, particularly with respect to the understanding of inference, topic management and coherence.

Four perspectives on L2 pragmatic development

L2 learners' development of pragmatic ability has been studied from a variety of theoretical perspectives. This paper seeks to assess the contributions made by different approaches to interlanguage pragmatics as a subfield of Second Language Acquisition. A first approach locates the development of pragmatic ability within a comprehensive model of communicative competence, either examining pragmatics as an autonomous component or in its interaction with grammatical ability. The discussion focuses on the evidence for and against the interdependence of pragmatic and grammatical ability. A second perspective explores pragmatic learning as information processing, with a particular view to the roles of attention, awareness, input, and metapragmatic knowledge. One important question requiring further exploration is whether principles of grammar learning extend to the learning of pragmatics. A third approach investigates pragmatic learning in sociocultural perspective. A key observation has been that pragmatic knowledge emerges from assisted performance, both in student-teacher and peer interaction. The fourth approach is language socialization, investigating how cultural and pragmatic knowledge are jointly acquired through learners' participation in recurring situated activities. In a final section, the paper discusses whether the four perspectives are compatible or mutually exclusive.