Pragmatic development is increasingly seen as the foundation stone of language acquisition more generally. From very early on, children demonstrate a strong desire to understand and be understood that motivates the acquisition of lexicon and grammar and enables ever more effective communication. In… read more
UB approaches have recently expanded to investigate the active role language learners have in unfolding conversations while using language to do things together (Behrens & Pfänder, 2022, p. 231). In this chapter, I will expand on this notion further from a pragmatic point of view, defined by… read more
Just like other baby apes, human infants make it their business to stay in safe contact with their caregivers. The difference is that humans do this not just by holding on for dear life, but by ensuring their caregivers are in psychological contact with them. To this end, many of the most… read more
This chapter reviews pragmatic development in the first two years of life. We first concentrate on the period from birth to nine months, during which time communication is essentially dyadic in nature: it is not ‘about’ some third entity but rather involves the infant and caregiver responding to… read more
Referential pacts are temporary conventions created by interlocutors for the duration of a conversation. They occur when a speaker somewhat arbitrarily chooses between multiple possible referring expressions (e.g., saying “the spotty dog” rather than “the muddy dog” for a dog that is both spotty… read more
Studies of children's “statistical learning” mechanisms have established that even infants are very competent at extracting grammar-like structure from sequences of language-like sounds. We review some recent work exploring how these mechanisms might be used to extract functional grammatical… read more
