Cover not available
Part of
Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition
Edited by Danielle Matthews
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 10] 2014
► pp. 37–52

The development of speech acts

ORCID logo
Children, like adults, use language to get things done. However, gaining an accurate picture of children’s development of communicative intent is challenging. While the behaviours used by children to express intent are external and thus to some degree measurable, the underlying psychological characterisation of intent is much more elusive. Speech act analysis involves identifying the goal behind a speaker’s utterance, gesture or sign, and provides a useful starting point for the analysis of communicative intent during both the pre-linguistic and linguistic stage. In the current chapter we begin by discussing the origins of Speech Act Theory and its relevance to child language development. We then discuss the emergence of speech acts in the language of young children, and also the relationship between form and function from a Speech Act perspective.
Published online: 26 June 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.10.03cam
References
Astington, J.W.
(1988) Children’s understanding of the speech act of promising. Journal of Child Language , 15, 157–173. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Austin, J.L.
(1962)  How to do Things with Words . Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Bates, E.
(1976)  Language and Context: Studies in the Acquisition of Pragmatics . New York, NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bates, E., Camaioni, L., & Volterra, V.
(1975) The acquisition of performatives prior to speech. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly , 21, 205–26.Google Scholar
(1976) Sensorimotor performatives. In E. Bates (Ed.), Language and Context: Studies in the Acquisition of Pragmatics . New York, NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bernicot, J., & Legros, S.
(1987) Direct and indirect directives: What do young children understand? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology , 43, 346–358. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bernicot, J., & Lavel, V.
(2004) Speech acts in children: The example of promises. In I. Noveck & D. Sperber (Eds.), Experimental Pragmatics (pp. 207–227). Basingstoke: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Bucciarelli, M., Colle, L., & Bara, G.B.
(2003) How children comprehend speech acts and communicative gestures. Journal of Pragmatics , 35, 207–241. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bloom, L.
(1970)  Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars . ­Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Brown, R.
(1973)  A First Language: The Early Stages . London: Allen & Unwin. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bruner, J.S.
(1975) The ontogenesis of speech acts. Journal of Child Language , 2, 1–19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Camaioni, L., Longobardi, E., Venuti, P., & Bornstein, M.
(1998) Maternal speech to 1-year-old children in two Italian cultural contexts. Early Development and Parenting , 7, 9–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cameron-Faulkner, T.
(2012) A functional account of verb use in the early stages of English multiword development. Journal of Child Language, 39: 885–897. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cameron-Faulkner, T., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M.
(2003) A construction based analysis of child directed speech. Cognitive Science , 27, 843–73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cameron-Faulkner, T., & Hickey, T.
(2011) Form and function in Irish child directed speech. Cognitive Linguistics , 22, 569–94. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, H.H., & Lucy, P.
(1975) What is meant from what is said. A study in conversationally conveyed request. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior , 14, 56–72. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Creusere, M.A.
(1999) Theories of adults’ understanding and use of irony and sarcasm: Applications to and evidence from research with children. Developmental Review , 19, 213–262. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dore, J.
(1975) Holophrases, speech acts and language universals. Journal of Child Language , 2, 21–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gordon, D.P., & Ervin-Tripp, S.
(1985) The development of requests. In R.L. Schieffelbusch (Ed.), Communicative Competence: Acquisition and Intervention . Beverley Hills, CA: ­College Hills Press.Google Scholar
Goffman, E.
(1974)  Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience . ­Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Halliday, M.A.K.
(1975)  Learning to Mean. Explorations in the Development of Language . ­London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Levinson, S.C.
(1983)  Pragmatics . Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Naigles, L.R., Hoff, E., & Vear, D.
(2009) Flexibility in early verb use: Evidence from a multiple-N diary study. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development , 74, 1–143. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ninio, A.
(1991) Introduction to the Ninio and Wheeler taxonomy of verbal communicative acts and to the INCA abridged version. Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Seattle, Washington, April, 1991.
(1992) The relation of children’s single word utterances to single word utterances in the input. Journal of Child Language , 19, 87–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ninio, A., & Snow, C.E.
(1996)  Pragmatic Development . Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Ninio, A., & Wheeler, P.
(1984) A manual for classifying verbal communicative acts in mother-infant interaction. Working Papers in Developmental Psychology, No. 1. Jerusalem: The Martin and Vivian Levin Center, Hebrew University . Reprinted as Transcript Analysis 1986, 3, 1–82.Google Scholar
Rakoczy, H., & Tomasello, M.
(2009) Done wrong or said wrong? Young children understand the normative directions of fit of different speech acts. Cognition , 13, 205–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rivero, M.
(2001) Pragmatic development in early infancy: The development of communicative intents expressed by three children during mealtimes. In M. Almgren, A. Barreña, M.J. Ezeizabarrena, I. Idiazabal, & B. MacWhinney (Eds.), Research on Child Language Acquisition: Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (pp. 546–557). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
(2010) Maternal expression of communicative intentions and pragmatic fine tuning in early infancy. Infant behavior & development , 33(4): 373–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reeder, K.
(1980) The emergence of illocutionary skills. Journal of Child Language , 7, 13–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ryckebusch, C., & Marcos, H.
(2004) Speech acts, social context and parent-toddler play between the ages of 1;5 and 2;3. Journal of Pragmatics , 36, 883–897. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sadock, J., & Zwicky, A.M.
(1985) Speech act distinctions in syntax. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. 1: Clause Structure . Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Schlegoff, E.A.
(1988) Presequences and indirection: Applying speech act theory to ordinary conversation. Journal of Pragmatics , 12, 55–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, J.
(1976) A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society , 5, 1–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, J., & Vanderveken, D.
(1985)  Foundations of Illocutionary Logic . Csambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Shatz, M.
(1978) Children’s comprehension of their mothers’ question-directives. Journal of Child Language , 5, 39–46. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Snow, C.E., Pan, B.A., Imbens-Bailey, A., & Herman, J.
(1996) Learning how to say what one means: A longitudinal study of children’s speech act use. Social Development , 5, 56–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stefanowitsch, A.
(2003) A construction-based approach to indirect speech acts. In ­K.-U. ­Panther & L. Thornburg (Eds.), Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Tarplee, C.
(1993)  Working on Talk: The Collaborative Shaping of Linguistic Skills within Child-adult Interaction . Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of York.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M.
(2000) Do children have adult syntactic competence. Cognition , 74, 209–53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2003)  Constructing a Language: A Usage-based Approach of Language Acquisition . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Wang, Y.
(2008)  Explorations in the Development of Young Children’s Speech Act of Threatening in Mandarin Chinese . Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag.Google Scholar
Winner, E., & Leekam, S.
(1991) Distinguishing irony from deception: Understanding the speaker’s second order intention. British Journal Of Developmental Psychology , 9, 257–270. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

Backus, Ad & Kutlay Yağmur
2019. Differences in pragmatic skills between bilingual Turkish immigrant children in the Netherlands and monolingual peers. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:4 ► pp. 817 ff. DOI logo
Bergey, Claire, Zoe Marshall, Simon DeDeo & Daniel Yurovsky
2022. Learning Communicative Acts in Children's Conversations: A Hidden Topic Markov Model Analysis of the CHILDES Corpora. Topics in Cognitive Science 14:2 ► pp. 388 ff. DOI logo
Bourjade, Marie, Hélène Cochet, Sandra Molesti & Michèle Guidetti
2020. Is Conceptual Diversity an Advantage for Scientific Inquiry? A Case Study on the Concept of ‘Gesture’ in Comparative Psychology. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 54:4 ► pp. 805 ff. DOI logo
ZEREY, Özge Gül & Hatice SOFU
2021. Turkish Preschool Children’s Pragmatic Competence on Apologies: The Influence of Sociolinguistic Factors and Contextual Variables. Dilbilim Araştırmaları Dergisi 32:3 ► pp. 17 ff. DOI logo
Zufferey, Sandrine
2016. Pragmatic acquisition. In Handbook of Pragmatics, DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. The Acquisition of Complex Morphology [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 30], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 december 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.