Developmental pragmatics can be understood as growing the skills of using a language appropriately in context. In other words, it concerns the evolution of abilities to cope with the interplay between language, language users, and context. To become pragmatically competent, language users need to have linguistic resources, understand the context of interaction, and employ the resources in the context appropriately. This competence takes time to develop, which is the focus of developmental pragmatics research. Researchers in this field study how language users improve pragmatic competence over time or what contextual factors affect the development of pragmatic competence. Different points of time are the key to revealing the development of pragmatic competence and distinguishing developmental pragmatics from other subfields of pragmatics. These different points of time can be indicated by language users’ ages or language proficiency levels. Language users can develop their pragmatic competence in a first language or a second language. This article is organized around two broad topics—first language pragmatic development and second language pragmatic development. Under these two general topics are more specific subtopics about preverbal pragmatic development, development of conversation organization, communicative acts, pragmatic awareness, among others.
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