Grice (Syntax and semantics: Speech acts, 1975, pp. 41-58, Vol. 3) proposed that conversation is guided by a spirit of cooperation that involves adherence to several conversational maxims. Three types of maxims were explored in the current study: 1) Quality, to be truthful; 2) Relation, to say only what is relevant to a conversation; and 3) Quantity, to provide as much information as required. Three-to five-year-olds were tested to determine the age at which an awareness of these Gricean maxims emerges. Children requested the help of one of two puppets in finding a hidden sticker. One puppet always adhered to the maxim being tested, while the other always violated it. Consistently choosing the puppet that adhered to the maxim was considered indicative of an understanding of that maxim. The results indicate that children were initially only successful in the Relation condition. While in general, children performed better at first in the Quantity condition compared with the Quality condition, 3-year-olds never performed above chance in the Quantity condition. The findings of the present study indicate that preschool children are sensitive to the violation of the Relation, Quality, and Quantity maxims at least under some conditions.To communicate effectively with others, children need to learn more than just the semantics and syntax of their language; they also need to learn about the pragmatics. Children must be aware of a large body of implicit information on how to conduct a conversation. This conversational awareness is necessary for children to comprehend the intended meaning of another speaker and to successfully convey their own messages to others (Siegal, 1999). Pragmatics, according to Grice (1975), involves conversational implicature where the meaning of a statement is not explicitly stated but is instead implied. To aid one in determining the implicated meaning, Grice argued that there is logic to conversation in the form of implicit maxims that speakers follow. The four types of maxims suggested by Grice were:Maxims of Quality

No abstract

according to Kreuz's principle of inferability, speakers tend to employ nonliteral language when it can reasonably be perceived by their conversational partner. In a computermediated communicative setting, such as e-mail, this suggests that the e-mail writer might use discourse tools that facilitate comprehension on the part of the recipient. The present study examined rates of usage for various forms of nonliteral language in 210 e-mail messages written by young adults. In 94.30% of all e-mails there was at least one nonliteral statement, and participants used an average of 2.90 nonliteral statements per e-mail. Results showed that forms of nonliteral language that are typically deemed to be riskier, such as sarcasm, were used much less frequently than other less risky forms, such as hyperbole, and were marked with discourse markers more often. This indicates that e-mail authors are sensitive to the risky nature of nonliteral language use in e-mail, yet are savvy to the tools available to them in this communicative medium.

In the present study we addressed two novel questions: (1) is children's irony appreciation and processing related to their empathy skills? and (2) is children's processing of a speaker's ironic meaning best explained by a modular or interactive theory? Participants were thirty-one 8- and 9-year-olds children. We used a variant of the visual world paradigm to assess children's processing of ironic and literal evaluative remarks; in this paradigm children's cognition is revealed through their actions and eye gaze. Results in this paradigm showed that children's irony appreciation and processing were correlated with their empathy development, suggesting that empathy or emotional perspective taking may be important for development of irony comprehension. Further, children's processing of irony was consistent with an interactive framework, in which children consider ironic meanings in the earliest moments, as speech unfolds. These results provide important new insights about development of this complex aspect of emotion recognition.

No abstract