Description du projet
Étudier la manière dont les enfants réagissent face aux utilisations non littérales de la langue
L’expression et la compréhension des intentions de communiquer, appelées capacités pragmatiques, soulignent l’utilisation de la langue et sa compréhension, et se développent de manière précoce. Les jeunes enfants utilisent la langue de manière créative pour s’exprimer et parvenir à leurs fins, et comprendre les intentions des autres. Cependant, ils peuvent dans le même temps éprouver des difficultés à comprendre les autres du fait de leurs utilisations non littérales de la langue. Le projet DEVCOM, financé par l’UE, vise à comprendre la manière dont les capacités de communication des enfants se développent, de ses étapes, et de la manière dont leur raisonnement pragmatique associé à des utilisations non littérales est influencé par leur apprentissage des significations conventionnelles des mots. Il utilisera des méthodologies innovantes, en combinant des mesures explicites et implicites, afin de mettre en lumière ce qui aide ou perturbe les enfants dans leur propre utilisation et compréhension de la langue non littérale.
Objectif
Children are born communicators. A growing body of developmental evidence suggests that the cognitive abilities enabling the expression and comprehension of communicative intentions – so-called pragmatic abilities – which underlie language use and understanding, develop early. However, a puzzling feature of pragmatic development is young children’s difficulties with non-literal uses of language (e.g. “I love you so much I could eat you up!”). How can children be early experts at a range of pragmatically complex tasks requiring attention to speakers’ intentions, but act like ‘literal listeners’ in other contexts? The objective of DEVCOM is to provide an account of the stages and factors involved in children’s developing competence with non-literal uses of language. The project will investigate the novel hypothesis that children’s growing sensitivity to sense conventions, which determine the publicly accepted meaning of words in their language, impedes children’s pragmatic reasoning with non-literal uses in the pre-school years. The empirical data will be gleaned from experimental studies with typically developing children aged 2-7 years, focusing on lexical innovation, lexical modulation, and figurative language, each highlighting the interaction of pragmatic reasoning with sensitivity to sense conventions in a distinct way. Further, the project will investigate whether the persistent difficulties with non-literal uses faced by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder may be linked to the same source. The project will use a set of novel methodologies combining explicit and implicit measures, assuming that while children’s performance on explicit measures is liable to be affected by a growing sensitivity to sense conventions, implicit measures may be more revealing of their actual pragmatic abilities. The empirical results will provide input to a novel theoretical account of pragmatic development that resolves the developmental puzzle of non-literal uses of language.
Champ scientifique
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Régime de financement
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitution d’accueil
0313 Oslo
Norvège