Pragmatic Development

A foundational feature of human communication lies in the fact that what a speaker means often goes beyond the literal meaning of what the speaker says. Within linguistics and philosophy, theories of meaning capture this fact by distinguishing between linguistically encoded (semantic) and contextually derived (pragmatic) aspects of communicated meaning. Following the seminal work of Paul Grice and much subsequent theorizing (Grice, 1975; Horn, 1984; Levinson, 2000; Sperber & Wilson, 1986), pragmatics is viewed as a form of intention recognition that involves inferentially reconstructing the meaning that the speaker had in mind and wanted to convey, beyond the literal meaning of an utterance. For the child learner, becoming pragmatically competent means becoming able to bridge the gap between what words and sentences mean and what the speaker intended to communicate by uttering them in a specific context. Crucially, however, since the meanings of words and sentences themselves are often unknown to the young child, developing pragmatic competence also involves using intention recognition to discover semantic meaning—for instance, by consulting the speaker’s eye gaze or mental state to understand the meaning of a novel word. Thus, from the perspective of the young learner, pragmatics both enriches linguistic-semantic meaning (e.g., during the interpretation of known words and structures) and restricts hypotheses about linguistic-semantic meaning (e.g., during the interpretation of unknown words). Perhaps because pragmatics is so richly and inextricably linked with the ability to both process and acquire language, and interconnects with a host of linguistic and cognitive processes, the large literature on pragmatic development has long resisted a neat synthesis. For example, a considerable body of work shows that very young children, even infants, are exquisitely attuned to the eye gaze and knowledge of their interlocutors, and use such sophisticated social reasoning to learn the meaning of novel words (Baldwin, 1991; Bloom, 2000; Southgate, Chevallier, & Csibra, 2010). Yet, in other respects, children’s ability to infer what others mean appears fragile and task-dependent, and many pragmatic phenomena that involve indirect or implied meanings—perhaps most famously metaphor and irony—present difficulties even for older learners (Grigoroglou & Papafragou, 2017; Matthews, 2014). In recent years there has been a wealth of exciting research on the nature and acquisition of pragmatics fueled by several concurrent developments across related fields: new formal models within theoretical linguistics that explore the semantics-pragmatics interface; more sophisticated psycholinguistic methods for studying how children (and adults) produce and interpret language in context; integrative efforts within developmental psychology to relate pragmatic growth to children’s cognitive abilities—especially the ability to think about others’ mental states (known as theory of mind) and a collection of control processes such as working memory, inhibition, and task-switching (known as executive function); and more theoretically oriented approaches to the pragmatic profile of special populations such as individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) that are known to face social and communicative challenges. Current work on how children acquire pragmatic competence builds on these new approaches to understand both children’s early sensitivity to pragmatic principles and their growing ability to implement these principles across different