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In:Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition
Edited by Danielle Matthews
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 10] 2014
► pp. 13–36

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The communicative infant from 0-18 months

The social-cognitive foundations of pragmatic development

 | University of Sheffield
ORCiD logo with link | University of Sheffield
Published online: 26 June 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.10.02ste
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 each other (including turn taking, emotional attunement, imitation, and responsiveness to eye contact, speech and temporal contingency). We next examine the period after nine months of age when infants begin to enter into triadic communication. During this period, the infant and caregiver communicate about or jointly attend to things that are external to the dyad, and infant abilities extend to reading intentions, initiating and responding to joint attention, and appealing to common ground. We argue that a better understanding of this period is essential to providing a full picture of the nature of human communication.
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Cited by (14)

Cited by 14 other publications

Garraffa, Maria & Greta Mazzaggio
2025. Pragmatics in the Health Sciences, DOI logo
Nakhshab, Mahbubeh, Ali Asgary & Akram Ahmadi
2025. The language use Inventory-Persian: report of the psychometric properties. BMC Psychology 13:1 DOI logo
Tuohimaa, Krista, Soile Loukusa, Heikki Löppönen, Antti A. Aarnisalo, Aarno Dietz, Antti Hyvärinen, Jaakko Laitakari, Satu Rimmanen, Jaakko Salonen, Ville Sivonen, Tanja Tennilä, Teija Tsupari, Sari Vikman, Nonna Virokannas, Johanna Hautala, Anna-Kaisa Tolonen, Taina Välimaa & Sari Kunnari
2025. Factors Associated With Social-Pragmatic Understanding in Deaf and Hard of Hearing and Typically Hearing 6-Year-Old Children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 68:2 ► pp. 808 ff. DOI logo
Aguirre, Marie, Mélanie Brun, Olivier Morin, Anne Reboul & Olivier Mascaro
2023. Expectations of Processing Ease, Informativeness, and Accuracy Guide Toddlers’ Processing of Novel Communicative Cues. Cognitive Science 47:11 DOI logo
Fernández-Flecha, María, Andrea Junyent & María Blume
2023. Pragmatic development in Peruvian children. Pragmatics & Cognition 30:2 ► pp. 377 ff. DOI logo
Vicente, Agustín & Ingrid Lossius Falkum
2023. Accounting for the preference for literal meanings in autism spectrum conditions. Mind & Language 38:1 ► pp. 119 ff. DOI logo
Beeching, Kate & Ludivine Crible
2022. Crosslinguistic paths of pragmatic development. Pragmatics & Cognition 29:2 ► pp. 195 ff. DOI logo
Wong, Kay H. Y., Kathy Y. S. Lee, Sharon C. Y. Tsze, Wilson S. Yu, Iris H.-Y. Ng, Michael C. F. Tong & Thomas Law
2022. Comparing Early Pragmatics in Typically Developing Children and Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 52:9 ► pp. 3825 ff. DOI logo
Geenen, Jarret
2021. Objects and materiality in pragmatic development: Here-and-now to then and-there. Multimodal Communication 10:1 ► pp. 19 ff. DOI logo
Dosi, Ifigeneia & Savvas Sotiriadis
2020. Interventions for early language development in monolingual and bilingual children with autism spectrum disorders: Two case studies. International Journal of Research Studies in Education 9:7 DOI logo
Roche, Laura, Amarie Carnett, Jeff Sigafoos, Michelle Stevens, Mark F. O’Reilly, Giulio E. Lancioni & Peter B. Marschik
2019. Using a Textual Prompt to Teach Multiword Requesting to Two Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder. Behavior Modification 43:6 ► pp. 819 ff. DOI logo
ATEŞ, BEYZA Ş. & AYLİN C. KÜNTAY
2018. Referential interactions of Turkish-learning children with their caregivers about non-absent objects: integration of non-verbal devices and prior discourse. Journal of Child Language 45:1 ► pp. 148 ff. DOI logo
Prieto, Pilar & Núria Esteve-Gibert
2018. Introduction. In The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 23], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Rohlfing, Katharina J., Britta Wrede, Anna-Lisa Vollmer & Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
2016. An Alternative to Mapping a Word onto a Concept in Language Acquisition: Pragmatic Frames. Frontiers in Psychology 7 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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