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Children's comprehension of their mothers' question-directives*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Marilyn Shatz
Marilyn Shatz
Affiliation:
Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York
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Abstract

Much of adult communication is carried on at the subtle level of indirect utterance meaning, where the speaker's intent is not literally expressed in his or her utterance. This work investigates the young child's ability to respond appropriately to the intended, as opposed to the literal, meaning of one class of such utterances, requests for action. The data were the responses of five children between 1; 7 and 2; 4 to the direct and indirect requests for action their mothers produced during a natural play session. All the children responded with action to requests for it regardless of how subtly the requests were expressed. The apparent ability of two-year-olds to deal with indirect speech acts is surprising in that the understanding of such utterances by adults is presumed to depend on a combination of sophisticated rule systems. Rather than grant the young child such knowledge, the alternative of an action-based response heuristic is proposed.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , February 1978 , pp. 39 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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Footnotes

[*]

A version of this work was presented to the Linguistic Society of America at the summer meeting 1974, in a paper entitled ‘The comprehension of indirect directives: can two-year-olds shut the door?’ The research was supported by NICHD training grant, HD 00337, to the author and by NICHD research grant, HD 527444, to Rochel Gelman. The author wishes to thank Marjorie Horton and Janet May for their assistance in coding the data. Address for correspondence: Dept. of Psychology, University of Michigan, 330 Packard Rd., Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104, U.S.A.

References

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