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

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。该奖学金旨在提高对其中一个方面的理解-儿童如何学习实用技能-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所说的要多得多；例如，当我们在讽刺时，这可能是显而易见的，但在大多数交流情况下，这以更微妙的方式发生。这意味着我们在不断地推断说话人的意思。这些实用技能与儿童发展过程中的社交、情感和认知学习密切相关。在我的博士研究中，我对一种特殊类型的语用推断进行了实证研究，这种推断被称为“含意”。例如，如果在回答“你见过他的父母吗？”，说话者说，“我见过他的妈妈”，然后听者推断说话者只见过他的妈妈（没有见过他的爸爸），假设说话者提供了充分的信息；但如果问题是“你为什么不高兴？”，那么推断出来的意思就会大不相同。我发现孩子们能够做出这种隐含的推论的年龄比我们之前认为的要小，大约从3岁开始，但是，关键的是，孩子们只有在简单的交流情况下才有这种能力，在这种情况下，语境支持推理过程。当孩子们必须将社会非语言信息整合到推理中，比如说话者知道什么或不知道什么，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到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，但没有证据表明单语或双语在3-5岁时有差异，尽管双语者在每种语言中的平均词汇量都较小。联谊会由三部分活动组成。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方向展开对话，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。这一点很重要，特别是对于幼儿和关键阶段1，因为整个小学对推理教学的新要求主要是基于关键阶段2儿童的阅读研究，而在关键阶段1，推理的基础也是通过发展语用学家研究的口语来建立的。第二次研讨会将把研究人员与实践者——教师和教师培训人员——聚集在一起，就他们的推理教学进行对话，交流第一次研讨会的综合发现，并确定产生影响的途径。2. 一篇关于内隐推理发展的系统综述文章我将通过对儿童内隐推理发展的系统综述和荟萃分析来加强我博士学位的全面叙事文献综述。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篇可访问的总结。3. 有限的新研究——一项关于语用推理和换位思考的实验研究我将解决我博士学位产生的一个紧迫问题：当孩子们在考虑说话人的观点或知识时遇到困难时，这是视觉换位思考的特殊问题，还是更普遍的社会换位思考问题？这将通过对4岁和6岁儿童的实证研究来实现，在一项任务中，该任务结合了在社会互动中进行隐含推理和采取他人的观点。

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.