This paper handles the history of the field; deals with the acquisition of social pragmatic skills (subdivided in a) indexing power relations between speaker and hearer; b) universal and culture-specific aspects of social pragmatics; and c) the acquisition of cognitive pragmatic skills; adresses implicatures, non-literal language uses and referring expressions; deals with pragmatics and cognitive development and with pragmatics and language acquisition. In order to become proficient language users, children must develop an array of abilities ranging from the understanding of non-literal language uses, the ability to produce referring expressions containing the adequate degree of information depending on their addressee’s knowledge state, the use of adequate expressions depending on social relations with their addressee, to name but a few. Traditionally, in theoretical pragmatics, these competencies have been addressed in two different trends of studies. On the one hand, studies focusing on the appropriate use of language depending on social relations between speaker and hearer, that investigate phenomena such as politeness. On the other hand, studies aiming at explaining how hearers enrich the linguistically-encoded meaning of sentences to access the speaker’s meaning, that focus on phenomena such as reference resolution and implicatures. In the field of developmental pragmatics, early studies were mostly focusing on the social dimension of pragmatics rather than its cognitive aspects. Another active trend of research in early developmental studies in pragmatics focused on assessing the hypotheses of speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) in the domain of language acquisition. As a result of the strong focus on social interactions in early developmental studies, pragmatics was for several decades mostly ignored in studies of language acquisition relying on a generativist model. These omissions reflect the fact that in this framework, pragmatics is not considered to be part of the language faculty because it is related to usage or, in Chomsky’s words, to performance. By contrast, pragmatics has always been at the heart of interactional and socio-pragmatic perspectives on language acquisition, that put a strong emphasis on social relations and children’s ability to use social cues such as gaze direction as key factors enabling them to discover language (Bruner 1975; Nelson 2007; Tomasello 2004). Similarly, the ethnographic approach to language acquisition includes a well-established research trend on language socialization (e.g. Duranti, Ochs and Schieffelin 2011), a term including “both socialization through language and to use language” (Ochs and Schieffelin 1986: 2). The lack of space dedicated to pragmatics in textbooks on language acquisition that were previously focusing only on the structure of language rather than language use is however rapidly changing, and recently edited textbooks and syntheses include chapters on pragmatics (e.g. Becker-Bryant 2009; Pouscoulous and Noveck 2009; Siegal and Surian 2009). The importance given to pragmatics in this recent body of literature reflects the fact that the field has been rapidly growing over the past decade, especially in the domain of cognitive-oriented studies. These recent studies have in addition brought the interface between linguistic and pragmatic development at the forefront of language acquisition research because of their focus on children’s ability to enrich linguistically-encoded meaning. At the same time, research on the acquisition of social pragmatic competency continues to be very active as well. Thanks to the use of new methodological designs to assess language development such as eye-tracking, the recent body of literature on pragmatic development has considerably altered a long-held assumption about the development of pragmatic skills, namely that they are universally late-acquired, and only kick in after the rest of language acquisition is already in place. The main results from both social and pragmatic developmental studies, underlying the broad array of young children’s pragmatic skills, are reviewed. Particular emphasis is placed on specific areas of cognitive pragmatic development such as scalar implicatures and non-literal language uses that have generated a lot of new research results over the past decade.