Conversational Competence and Social Development

A key issue throughout the book has been that the child's communicative ability depends on the child's increasing understanding of the social perspective of others and the social context. To communicate successfully, the child must be able to produce and comprehend utterances with reference to their social appropriateness. The models I have applied to the study of language development, the speech-acts model and Grice's conversational model, call for new perspectives regarding the conceptual underpinnings of linguistic communication. In particular, they direct us to investigate a new kind of non-linguistic knowledge - social knowledge. On theoretical grounds I isolated several parameters of social awareness that are linked to successful linguistic communication. As I argued in chapter 3, children's ability to make inferences about other people, to understand others' perspectives as different from their own, and their ability to understand what social contexts involve, are necessary underpinnings of linguistic communication.

To investigate the extent to which general social knowledge is in fact linked to language use, I examined the performance of the same children on several tasks which measure social knowledge. Here I will first present the results of the children's performance on the socio-cognitive tasks and then discuss the social interaction with their mothers that children engaged in during the game. The chapter ends with an analysis of the interdependence of socio-cognitive development and communicative development. Both theoretical argument and empirical research is presented.