Understanding Contextual and Social Meaning in Typically Developing Finnish-Speaking Four- To Eight-Year-Old Children

Abstract

This study examined the development of social-pragmatic comprehension in 170 Finnish four-to eight-year-old children. The children were asked to respond to socially and contextually demanding questions targeting their social-pragmatic language processing, and to explain their correct answers in order to elicit their awareness of how they had derived the answers from the context. The results showed that the number of correct answers increased especially between the ages of four and seven years. We found that questions demanding contextual processing without mind-reading were the easiest to understand, followed by questions demanding processing of feelings of others and false beliefs. The questions demanding understanding of relevant language use and processing of contextual factors including mental states and intentions were the most challenging for the children. Between four and five years of age there was a remarkable developmental phase in children's ability to give proper explanations.

Social-pragmatic contextual comprehension in Italian preschool and school-aged children: a study using the Pragma test

“…Donaldson (2006) highlighted that although three-year-old children were able to distinguish between cause and effect, it is not until the age of eight that children are able to use "because" or "so" when giving deductive explanations as evidence supporting a conclusion. This finding was later supported by Loukusa et al ( , 2017. Although, in Loukusa et al (2017) study, five-year-old children managed to explain many of their correct answers, it was only at the age of eight when they reached 80% for correct explanations.…”

“…This finding was later supported by Loukusa et al ( , 2017. Although, in Loukusa et al (2017) study, five-year-old children managed to explain many of their correct answers, it was only at the age of eight when they reached 80% for correct explanations. As children develop they become more able to explicitly express the information they had used in arriving at their answers.…”

“…The ability to give relevant explanations to answers that are demanding from the point of view of contextual processing is challenging since they require, for example, the ability to distinguish between cause and effect as well as the ability to manipulate premises required in deriving a conclusion. Current research suggests that becoming fully aware of one's own processing in different situations and being able to give a verbal explanation on request develops over a period of time (Donaldson 2006;Letts and Leinonen 2001;Loukusa et al , 2017. Donaldson (2006) highlighted that although three-year-old children were able to distinguish between cause and effect, it is not until the age of eight that children are able to use "because" or "so" when giving deductive explanations as evidence supporting a conclusion.…”

Children understand communication intuitively but indirect communication makes them think twice – Evidence from pupillometry and looking patterns

“…indirect communication involving such relevance implicatures as the one described above (Bucciarelli et al, 2003;de Villiers et al, 2009;Elrod, 1987;Loukusa et al, 2007Loukusa et al, , 2017; but see Schulze et al, 2013, and 2020 for 3-year-olds' successful performance in a simplified paradigm).…”

Addressing the Challenge of Verbal Irony: Getting Serious about Sarcasm Training

“…They argued that a child's language skills allow them to participate in conversations and interactions and it is this experience that gives children insight about the communicative intentions of the ironic speaker. Further, children's ability to attend to and use contextually relevant information to inform their interpretations of speech acts is developing between ages four and eight (Loukusa et al 2017) and likely supports irony appreciation.…”