Bridging the gap between prosody and pragmatics : the acquisition of pragmatic prosody in the preschool years and its relation with Theory of Mind

While it is well known that prosodic features are central in the conveyance of pragmatic meaning across languages, developmental research has assessed a narrow set of pragmatic functions of prosody. Research on prosodic development has focused on early infancy, with the subsequent preschool ages and beyond having received less attention. This study sets out to explore how young preschoolers develop the ability to use prosody to express pragmatic meanings while taking into account children's Theory of Mind (ToM) development. Though ToM has been suggested to be linked to the development of receptive prosody, little is known about its relationship with expressive prosodic skills. A total of 102 3- to 4-year-old Catalan-speaking children were assessed for their pragmatic prosody skills using 35 picture-supported prompts revolving around a variety of social scenarios, as well as for their ToM skills. The responses were analyzed for prosodic appropriateness. The analyses revealed that 3- to 4-year-olds successfully produced prosody to encode basic expressive acts and unbiased speech acts such as information-seeking questions. Yet they had more trouble with complex expressive acts and biased speech acts such as the ones that convey speakers' beliefs. Further analyses showed that ToM alone is not sufficient to explain children's prosodic score, but the prosodic performance in some pragmatic areas (unbiased pragmatic meanings) was predicted by the interaction between ToM and age. Overall, this evidence for the acquisition of pragmatic prosody by young preschoolers demonstrates the importance of bridging the gap between prosody and pragmatics when accounting for prosodic developmental profiles, as well as taking into account the potential influence of ToM and other socio-cognitive and language skills in this development

The Developing architecture of expressive pragmatics in preschoolers: multimodal and structural language trumps social cognition

Pragmatics, defined as the ability to use language socially, matters enormously in our day-to-day life and involves both the linguistic and social aspects of human communication. The literature focusing on developmental pragmatics has explored the interplay between children’s pragmatic, structural language (e.g., vocabulary), and social cognition skills (e.g., Theory of Mind, abbreviated as ToM, and emotion understanding). However, the focus of this research has largely been on receptive pragmatic domains and verbal, nonmultimodal language, while much less is known about the acquisition of expressive pragmatics and its relationship with multimodal language, that is, language expressed through prosody and gesture. The overarching aim of this thesis is to investigate expressive pragmatic abilities during early preschool years (ages 3– 4), in relation to language—both structural and multimodal—and social cognition, and to explore ways to promote these abilities in classroom context. In doing so, we seek to provide insight into the developing architecture of expressive pragmatics and to integrate multimodal abilities into developmental pragmatic research. The four studies comprising this thesis analyze a cohort of more than 100 Catalan-speaking 3- to 4-year-old children. In order to comprehensively assess expressive pragmatic competence, we first created and validated a new tool (the Audiovisual Pragmatic Test, APT) which was employed in all four studies and which tests the child’s ability to use language in a variety of common social contexts. Study 1 analyzes the pragmatic and prosodic skills of a group of 3- to 4-year-olds in relation to structural language (vocabulary and syntax) and social cognition (ToM, emotion understanding, and metacognitive vocabulary). Results show that pragmatics and prosody are more closely related to linguistic skills than to social cognition. Building on the results of Study 1, the following two studies explore the link between pragmatics and multimodal language. While also taking into account children’s ToM development, Study 2 examines the status of prosody as a pragmatic marker and answers the question of how 3- to 4-year-olds develop the ability to use prosody to express pragmatic meanings The results allow us to assess the pragmatic prosody profile of viii children of this age and show that ToM alone is not sufficient to explain children’s prosodic performance. Study 3 explores whether gesture frequency (via the APT) and gesture accuracy (via a multimodal imitation task) are related to narrative skills in children aged 3 to 4. The main finding is that gesture accuracy is a positive predictor of narrative structure scores, suggesting that gesture and narrative skills are intertwined. Finally, Study 4 assesses whether multimodal and non-multimodal conversational interventions can promote pragmatic and socio-cognitive abilities in preschoolers. Results show enhanced performance for pragmatics (but not social cognition) in the posttest, demonstrating the value of languagebased interventions focused on socio-cognitive aspects, both multimodal and non-multimodal, in improving pragmatic abilities. Altogether, this thesis expands our knowledge of the acquisition of expressive pragmatics in the early preschool years. The four studies show that expressive pragmatic abilities at this age are tightly linked to language, both structural and multimodal, and less so to social cognition. Specifically, the thesis has provided evidence that components of both non-multimodal and multimodal language are associated with pragmatic competence and can help foster pragmatic development. These findings place expressive pragmatic abilities of preschoolers within the linguistic—rather than the sociocognitive— domain and highlight the importance of taking multimodal abilities into account when investigating pragmatic development. Beyond furthering our understanding of the architecture of expressive pragmatics in the preschool years, these results are relevant for educational and clinical practices, as they lay both practical and theoretical foundations for pragmatic assessment and intervention with typically and, potentially, atypically developing children

Narrative Performance and Sociopragmatic Abilities in Preschool Children are Linked to Multimodal Imitation Skills

Over recent decades much research has analyzed the relevance of 9- to 20- month-old infants’ early imitation skills (object- and language-based imitation) for language development. Yet there have been few systematic comparisons of the joint relevance of these imitative behaviors later on in development. This correlational study investigated whether multimodal imitation (gestural, prosodic, and lexical components) and object-based imitation are related to narratives and sociopragmatics in preschoolers. Thirty-one typically developing 3- to 4-year-old children performed four tasks to assess multimodal imitation, object-based imitation, narrative abilities, and sociopragmatic abilities. Results revealed that both narrative and sociopragmatic skills were significantly related to multimodal imitation, but not to object-based imitation, indicating that preschoolers’ ability to imitate socially relevant multimodal cues is strongly related to language and sociocommunicative skills. Therefore, this evidence supports a broader conceptualization of imitation behaviors in the field of language development that systematically integrates prosodic, gestural, and verbal linguistic patterns

Bridging the Gap Between Prosody and Pragmatics: The Acquisition of Pragmatic Prosody in the Preschool Years and Its Relation With Theory of Mind

While it is well known that prosodic features are central in the conveyance of pragmatic meaning across languages, developmental research has assessed a narrow set of pragmatic functions of prosody. Research on prosodic development has focused on early infancy, with the subsequent preschool ages and beyond having received less attention. This study sets out to explore how young preschoolers develop the ability to use prosody to express pragmatic meanings while taking into account children’s Theory of Mind (ToM) development. Though ToM has been suggested to be linked to the development of receptive prosody, little is known about its relationship with expressive prosodic skills. A total of 102 3- to 4-year-old Catalan-speaking children were assessed for their pragmatic prosody skills using 35 picture-supported prompts revolving around a variety of social scenarios, as well as for their ToM skills. The responses were analyzed for prosodic appropriateness. The analyses revealed that 3- to 4-year-olds successfully produced prosody to encode basic expressive acts and unbiased speech acts such as information-seeking questions. Yet they had more trouble with complex expressive acts and biased speech acts such as the ones that convey speakers’ beliefs. Further analyses showed that ToM alone is not sufficient to explain children’s prosodic score, but the prosodic performance in some pragmatic areas (unbiased pragmatic meanings) was predicted by the interaction between ToM and age. Overall, this evidence for the acquisition of pragmatic prosody by young preschoolers demonstrates the importance of bridging the gap between prosody and pragmatics when accounting for prosodic developmental profiles, as well as taking into account the potential influence of ToM and other socio-cognitive and language skills in this development