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Article published In: Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 32:2 (2025) ► pp.354–381

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Identification and classification of implicit speech acts among Chinese children in middle childhood

 | Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
ORCiD logo with link | Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
 | University of Houston
 | Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University |
 | Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Published online: 13 November 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.24014.xia
Abstract
Despite the numerous studies on the perception of speech acts, very little is known about how children in middle childhood perceive implicit speech acts (ISA) across different ages. To this end, referring to the research paradigm described by Holtgraves (. 2005. The production and perception of implicit performatives. Journal of Pragmatics 37(12). 2024–2043. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2008. Automatic intention recognition in conversation processing. Journal of Memory and Language 58(3). 627–645. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), this study aimed to examine the identification and classification of utterances with implicit performatives among 621 Chinese children between the age of 9–13. The results indicate that on the identification task, 11- and 12-year-olds significantly outperformed 9-year-olds, and girls identify more implicit speech acts than boys. Most importantly, similar to adults, 13-year-olds categorized implicit speech acts based on the emotional valence of listeners, while 11-year-olds tended to group them according to the psychological states and attitudes of the speakers. However, 9-year-olds were not able to classify implicit speech acts. The above findings offer valuable implications for pragmatic teaching and research.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Speech act theory
    • 1.2The impact of the Chinese context on the study of speech acts
    • 1.3Children’s perception and production of speech acts across different ages
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Pilot experiment
      • 2.1.1Participants
    • 2.2Materials and procedure
      • 2.2.1Results
    • 2.2Experiment 1
      • 2.2.1Participants
      • 2.2.2Materials and procedure
      • 2.2.3Results
    • 2.3Experiment 2
      • 2.3.1Participants
      • 2.3.2Materials and procedure
      • 2.3.3Results
    • 2.4Experiment 3
      • 2.4.1Participants
      • 2.4.2Materials and procedure
      • 2.4.3Results
  • 3.Discussion
    • 3.1The speech act corpus of Chinese children
    • 3.2The development of speech act identification capacity and gender differences
    • 3.3The development of implicit speech act classification capacity
    • 3.4Implications of the present study
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Conflict of interest
  • Authors’ contribution
  • Data availability statement
  • Notes
  • References
References (61)
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