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

Abstract

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.