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Is early pragmatic development measurable?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Philip S. Dale
Philip S. Dale
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Abstract

Measures of pragmatic development for children in the second year of life were developed, based on a brief (30 minute) language sample and on structured elicitation conditions. When age is partialled out, number of pragmatic functions expressed is not statistically related to MLU, due to the fact that the number of functions grows steadily during the one-word and very early two-word phases. Performance on the structured imperative tasks also reflects development during this period, though performance on the declarative tasks does not. We conclude that the range of pragmatic functions in the second year is measurable and contributes information not provided by a measure of syntactic development such as MLU. Such information should prove useful for research on language and cognition in normal and language-impaired children.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , February 1980 , pp. 1 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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Footnotes

[*]

A portion of the research reported here was presented at the First International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Tokyo, August 1978. This research was supported by Research Contract HD-3-2793 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, entitled ‘An Investigation of Certain Relationships between Hearing Impairment and Language Disability’, and by the Child Development and Mental Retardation Center, University of Washington. The work of Diana Hughes and Howard Goldstein in conducting the experiment and devising the coding systems, and the help of Nancy Cook and Carol Stoel-Gammon in preparing this paper, are gratefully acknowledged. Address for correspondence: Psychology Department NI-25, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, U.S.A.

References

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