Pragmatic development in a first language: An overview

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of children’s developing pragmatic competencies, a term broadly defined as the ability to understand and use language appropriately in context. Pragmatic competencies thus defined include both the ability to adapt one’s language depending on social contexts of interaction, and to enrich the linguistic meaning of sentences to access the speaker’s explicit and implicit meaning. We provide evidence that the acquisition of pragmatic competencies spans over a long period of time: while some pragmatic competencies are already operational in preverbal infants, others first appear or keep on maturing until late during childhood. We review the cognitive, social and linguistic factors that account for this variability, and discuss how methodological differences between studies impact on the observed age of acquisition.