Socio-pragmatic skills underlying language development: boundaries between typical and atypical development

Abstract

Human infants develop a unique combination of socio-pragmatic skills enabling them to learn language and effective communication from interactions in social engagement with others in the first two years of life. The scope of linguistic pragmatics includes appropriate use of the linguistic code in the direction of requirements or demands of a communicative context and/or partner (Levinson, 1983). However, pragmatic development also includes knowing community-or culture-specific communication rules (Carminol and Sparks, 2014) and appropriately integrating linguistic code with non-linguistic action (Küntay, Nakamura, and Ateş-Şen, 2014). Therefore, prelinguistic infants’ communication with others is especially important since it allows us to understand the developmental course of “pure pragmatic” skills that emerge well before and play a key role in the acquisition of linguistic structures (Matthews, 2014). With such an understanding, the present section focuses on how infants use nonverbal devices such as looks and gestures in order to achieve a successful communication and how then they translate these early emerging pragmatic skills into more advanced forms such as joint engagement and referential interaction. We will cover crosslinguistic and crosscultural work as we believe in the benefits of conducting more comparative work about the role of pragmatics on typical language acquition generally (Küntay et al., 2014), and on atypical communicative development specifically (Norbury, 2014).