Children's communicative development - bringing experimental pragmatics to the classroom

儿童交际发展——将实验语用学带入课堂

• 批准号: ES/S010203/1
• 负责人: Elspeth Wilson
• 金额: $ 11.8万
• 依托单位: University of Cambridge
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2019 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FS010203%2F1
• 关键词: Children; communicative; development; bringing; experimental

The development of language and communication skills is crucial for children's wellbeing and education outcomes. This Fellowship is about improving understanding of one aspect of this - how children learn pragmatic skills - and applying this understanding to practice. When we communicate, we often mean far more than we say; this may be obvious when we are ironic, for example, but happens in more subtle ways in most instances of communication. This means that we are constantly making inferences about what the speaker means. These pragmatic skills are bound up with social, emotional and cognitive learning in children's development. In my doctoral research, I empirically investigated a particular type of pragmatic inference, known as an 'implicature'. For instance, if in answer to the question, 'did you meet his parents?', the speaker says, 'I met his mum', then the hearer infers that the speaker met only his mum (not his dad), by assuming that the speaker is fully informative; but if the question were 'why are you upset?', then the inferred meaning would be quite different. I found that children are able to make these kind of implicature inferences at a younger age than often previously thought, from about 3 years, but, crucially, that children only have this competence in simple communicative situations, where the context supports the inference-making process. When children have to integrate social non-linguistic information into the inference, such as what the speaker knows or does not know, they struggle to do so even aged 6, in contrast to adults who are able to take into account all this different information. Furthermore, I found that children's pragmatic development is closely associated with their vocabulary and grammar, but did not see evidence that being monolingual or bilingual makes a difference at 3-5 years, even though bilinguals have smaller vocabularies in each language on average. The Fellowship consists in three strands of activity. 1. Dialogue, application and impact - workshops on developmental pragmatics and reading inferencesI will create a network with education and psychology researchers to open a dialogue on two closely-related but to date separate lines of research, on developmental pragmatics and on inferences in reading comprehension. Through a day-long workshop we will identify commonalities in findings, avenues for combined research, and recommendations for classroom practice. This is important, especially for Early Years and Key Stage 1, as new requirements for teaching inference-making across primary school are mostly based on research on reading with Key Stage 2 children, while in Key Stage 1 the foundations for inference-making are also built through the oral language studied by developmental pragmaticians. A second workshop will bring together researchers with practitioners - teachers and teacher trainers - to engage in dialogue about their teaching of inference-making, to communicate the synthesised findings from the first workshop, and to identify routes to impact. 2. A systematic review article on the development of implicature inferencesI will enhance the thorough narrative literature review of my PhD by producing a systematic review and meta-analysis of children's development of implicature inferences. I aim to publish this as an article in an academic journal, and as an accessible summary in practitioner magazines. 3. Limited new research - an experimental study on pragmatic inferencing and perspective-takingI will address a pressing question ensuing from my PhD: when children struggle with taking into account the speaker's perspective or knowledge, is it a particular problem with visual perspective-taking, or with social perspective-taking more generally? This will be achieved through an empirical study with 4- and 6-year-olds, in a task which combines making implicature inferences with taking another's perspective in social interaction.

语言和沟通技能的发展对儿童的福祉和教育成果至关重要。这个奖学金是关于提高对其中一个方面的理解-儿童如何学习语用技能-并将这种理解应用于实践。 当我们交流时，我们的意思往往比我们说的要多得多;例如，当我们讽刺时，这可能是显而易见的，但在大多数交流情况下，这会以更微妙的方式发生。这意味着我们不断地对说话者的意思进行推断。这些语用技能与儿童发展中的社会、情感和认知学习密切相关。在我的博士研究中，我实证研究了一种特殊类型的语用推理，称为“含义”。例如，如果在回答这个问题时，你见过他的父母吗？如果说话人说，“我遇到了他的妈妈”，那么听话人就推断出说话人只遇到了他的妈妈（而不是他的爸爸），假设说话人提供了充分的信息;但是如果问题是“你为什么不高兴？”’，那么推断出来的意义就大不相同了。 我发现，儿童能够在比以前认为的更小的年龄（大约3岁）做出这种含义推断，但是，至关重要的是，儿童只有在简单的交际情境中才有这种能力，在这种情境中，上下文支持推理过程。当儿童必须将社会非语言信息整合到推理中时，例如说话者知道或不知道什么，他们甚至在6岁时也很难做到这一点，而成年人则能够考虑所有这些不同的信息。此外，我发现儿童的语用发展与他们的词汇和语法密切相关，但没有看到证据表明单语或双语在3-5岁时会产生差异，尽管双语者平均每种语言的词汇量较小。该研究金包括三个活动链。1.对话，应用和影响-发展语用学和阅读推理研讨会我将与教育和心理学研究人员建立一个网络，就两个密切相关但迄今为止独立的研究领域展开对话，即发展语用学和阅读理解中的推理。通过为期一天的研讨会，我们将确定研究结果的共性，联合研究的途径，以及课堂实践的建议。这是很重要的，特别是早期和关键阶段1，作为新的要求教学推理决策在整个小学主要是基于研究阅读与关键阶段2的孩子，而在关键阶段1的基础，推理决策也建立通过口头语言研究的发展实用主义者。第二个讲习班将使研究人员与从业人员-教师和教师培训者-聚集在一起，就他们的推理教学进行对话，交流第一个讲习班的综合研究结果，并确定产生影响的途径。2.一个系统的评论文章发展的含义inferencesI将提高彻底的叙事文献综述我的博士学位，通过生产系统的审查和元分析儿童的发展含义推断。我的目标是在学术期刊上发表这篇文章，并在从业者杂志上作为一个可访问的摘要。 3.有限的新研究-一项关于语用推理和观点采择的实验研究我将解决一个紧迫的问题，随之而来的是我的博士学位：当孩子们努力考虑说话者的观点或知识时，这是视觉观点采择的一个特殊问题，还是更普遍的社会观点采择？这将是通过一项实证研究与4岁和6岁的孩子，在一项任务，结合了在社会交往中采取另一个的角度进行含义推断。

项目成果

Children's developing conversational and reading inference skills: a call for a collaborative approach

儿童对话和阅读推理能力的发展：呼吁协作方法

• 发表时间: 2022
• 作者: Wilson E

Children's development of manner implicatures and their sense of conventionality (preregistration poster)

儿童礼仪含义及其常规感的发展（预登记海报）

• 发表时间: 2022
• 作者: Wilson E

Pragmatic, linguistic and cognitive factors in young children's development of quantity, relevance and word learning inferences

幼儿数量、相关性和单词学习推理发展中的语用、语言和认知因素

• DOI: 10.1017/s0305000921000453
• 发表时间: 2021
• 期刊: Journal of Child Language
• 影响因子: 2.2
• 作者: WILSON E