Gesture and prosody are considered to be important precursors in early language development. In the present study, we ask whether those cues play a similar role later in children's acquisition of more complex pragmatic skills, such as politeness. 64 three- to five-year-old Catalan-dominant children participated in a request production task in four different conditions. They were prompted to request an object from either a classmate or an unfamiliar adult experimenter, with the implied cost of the request to the receiver's face thus being either high or low. Results showed that these preschool-age children used mitigating prosodic and gestural strategies to encode politeness earlier and more often than they used lexical or morphosyntactic markers, and that those cues develop incrementally during the preschool years. These findings suggest that prosody, gesture, and other body signals are an essential first step in the development of children's socio-pragmatic competence.

While prosody has been shown to act as a syntactic bootstrapper in early language acquisition, little is known about the role that prosody plays in the later development of a child's ability to communicate pragmatic information such as the expression of politeness. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether preschool children use prosody earlier and more prominently than lexical and morphosyntactic cues to signal a polite stance. To this end, 64 three-to five-year-old Catalan-dominant children participated in a cross-sectional study involving a request production task under four different conditions, with interlocutors either a classmate or an unfamiliar adult (low/high social distance), and the 'cost' to the interlocutor's face either low or high. The results showed that preschool children tend to use mitigating prosodic strategies to encode a polite stance early on and more markedly than they use lexical or morphosyntactic markers. These findings are consistent with what other research has found regarding the prosodic mitigation strategies used by Catalan-speaking adults to mark polite stance.