Introduction

In Chapter 1, the extended course that normally developing children pass through on their way to acquiring pragmatic competence was examined. Our knowledge of normal pragmatic development derives from experimental studies that have examined a range of pragmatic phenomena in language-intact children. Amongst other pragmatic skills, these studies have assessed normally developing children's appreciation of scalar implicatures (Noveck 2001; Feeney et al. 2004) and their use of speech acts such as apologies and promises (Astington 1988; Ely and Gleason 2006). It was noted in the first chapter that the literature on developmental pragmatics is considerably less extensive than the literature on other aspects of language development. One need only compare the relatively underdeveloped state of our knowledge of the acquisition of speech acts or implicatures to our much greater understanding of the order in which young children acquire grammatical morphemes and speech sounds to see that this is the case. The less advanced state of our knowledge of developmental pragmatics compared to other aspects of language development has had serious consequences for the study of disordered pragmatics. Clearly defined accounts of the acquisition of syntax and phonology in normally developing children have provided investigators with a framework within which to interpret findings of syntactic and phonological impairment in language-disordered children. In pragmatics, no such framework exists. This is as true today as it was nearly thirty years ago when the first clinical studies of pragmatics began to emerge.