Researchers interested in children's understanding of mind have claimed that the ability to ascribe beliefs and intentions is a late development, occurring well after children have learned to speak and comprehend the speech of others. On the other hand, there are convincing arguments to show that verbal communication requires the ability to attribute beliefs and intentions. Hence if one accepts the findings from research into children's understanding of mind, one should predict that young children will have severe difficulties in verbal communication. Conversely, if this prediction fails, this casts doubt on the claim that young children lack meta-representational skills. Using insights from Relevance Theory, an experiment was designed to test children's ability to recover a speaker's intended referent in situations in which the speaker's words underdetermine the referent. Results suggest that children's skills are comparable to those of untutored adults in similar situations. Thus this study indirectly casts doubt on the claim that young children lack meta-representational skills.
2007. Answering contextually demanding questions: Pragmatic errors produced by children with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Communication Disorders 40:5 ► pp. 357 ff.
2007. Use of Context in Pragmatic Language Comprehension by Children with Asperger Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 37:6 ► pp. 1049 ff.
Loukusa, Soile, Eeva Leinonen & Nuala Ryder
2007. Development of pragmatic language comprehension in Finnish-speaking children. First Language 27:3 ► pp. 279 ff.
2017. Understanding Contextual and Social Meaning in Typically Developing Finnish-Speaking Four- To Eight-Year-Old Children. Psychology of Language and Communication 21:1 ► pp. 408 ff.
Loukusa, Soile, Nuala Ryder & Eeva Leinonen
2008. Answering Questions and Explaining Answers: A Study of Finnish-Speaking Children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 37:3 ► pp. 219 ff.
Tendahl, Markus & Raymond W. Gibbs
2008. Complementary perspectives on metaphor: Cognitive linguistics and relevance theory. Journal of Pragmatics 40:11 ► pp. 1823 ff.
Wilson, Deirdre
2005. New directions for research on pragmatics and modularity. Lingua 115:8 ► pp. 1129 ff.
2009. Development of communication skills in Finnish pre-school children examined by the Children's Communication Checklist (CCC). Child Language Teaching and Therapy 25:2 ► pp. 235 ff.
[no author supplied]
2006. Bibliography. In The Handbook of Pragmatics, ► pp. 742 ff.
[no author supplied]
2012. Bibliographie. In Initiation à l'étude du sens, ► pp. 239 ff.
[no author supplied]
2016. Literatur. In Autismus als Kontextblindheit, ► pp. 311 ff.
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