Communicative And Cognitive Abilities And Disabilities In The Sensorimotor Period.

Abstract

A number of recent studies of early child language acquisition have been motivated by linguistic theories of pragmatics; i.e., the study of language used in context. Pragmatically-motivated research goes beyond the utterance itself to examine the dynamic relation ship between the child's early communication and the context in which it was generated. Such research requires that the investigator document, analyze, and interpret the child's utterance, the meaning intended by the child, his sensorimotor actions that precede, ac company, and follow the utterance, the knowledge shared by the com municative dyad, and the minute details of the context per se. Because pragmatic theory predicates that the speaker's intention can not be decoded by his listener without knowledge of the contextual elements surrounding his message, its methodology has dramatically added data related to child language acquisition. Among the theoretical emphases that have emerged in the de velopmental pragmatics literature is that put forth by Bates (1976). By considering the child's level of cognitive development as well as the generative semantic pragmatic structure, she constructed a unitary framework to account for communicative intention, presup posed information and the proposition of an utterance. This permitted her to trace the emergence of intentional communication from its earliest prelinguistic gestural prototypes through later symbolic elab oration. Consequently, this paper will begin with a brief discussion of Bates' interpretation of the generative-semantic model of the communicative intention or performative and its development in normal children. The notion of presupposition or shared information will then be discussed in a similar manner. The development of these pragmatic structures will then be related to the development of cognitive abilities in the child. The potential relevance of these concepts for the study of childhood language disability will be out lined. This will then be followed by a description and discussion of the experiment comparing pragmatic development in language dis abled and normal children.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 87 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.