The Development of Pragmatic Differentiation Skills in Preschool-Aged Bilingual Children.

Abstract

This dissertation examined pragmatic differentiation, bilingual speakers’ ability to use two languages appropriately with different speakers. Case studies of naturalistic interaction have shown that some sensitivity emerges in early childhood (by 2 years); however, the component skills of this pragmatic understanding and their relation to other developing metacognitive capacities have not been examined. In order to examine these issues, I compared the language use of 28 bilingual children (2;7 to 3;10 and 4;1 to 4;11) across three tasks, which varied in context and interlocutor. All children were bilingual in English and Marathi, an Indian language. I also included theory of mind measures to assess how developing cognitive capacities relate to pragmatic ability. In Study 1, each child participated in an Object Naming task, where he/she was asked to name familiar objects, and a Free Play task in which the child conversed with an adult. Both tasks were conducted twice, once with an English speaker and once with a Marathi speaker. In Study 2, the child and one of his/her bilingual parents discussed a picture book in three different sessions: one with the parent-child dyad alone, and one each where a third-person bystander was either an English speaker or a Marathi speaker. Children performed very well in the Free Play task, using more of the appropriate language with each speaker. Furthermore, children switched languages between the two consecutive sessions. However, children had more difficulty with Object Naming, and used predominantly English labels with both speakers. There were developmental effects; older children were more responsive to prompts to switch languages. This responsiveness was also highly related to children’s theory of mind scores, even when controlling for their age. Finally, as predicted for the Picture Book task, parents were sensitive to the experimenter’s presence and adjusted their language use accordingly; however, children did not follow their parents’ model and adjust their language use between sessions. These results demonstrate that pragmatic differentiation is not an all-or-none ability, but one which has component skills that develop over the preschool years. This protracted development is also related to metacognitive abilities which emerge during the preschool years.