Learning How to Say What One Means: A Longitudinal Study of Children's Speech Act Use*

In this paper we present a set of methods for describing development in the expression of communicative intents. Studying children in interaction with a parent, we found children improved from age 14 to 32 months in the number of communicative attempts per minute they made, in the intelligibility of their attempts, as well as in the repertoire of intents they expressed. Correlations with other language measures suggest that a complete picture of language development requires a description of pragmatic skills in addition to syntactic and lexical indices. Our two-level coding scheme revealed that the social-interactive interchanges most commonly engaged in by the youngest children were negotiating immediate activity, discussing a joint focus of attention, and directing hearer's attention. Within these social interchanges, a small but widely shared set of communicative intents was expressed by the younger children; surprisingly, questions were quite late emerging communicative intents, as were agreeing, disagreeing, and giving reasons