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Asking children to ask; an experimental investigation of the pragmatics of relayed questions*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Christine Tanz
Christine Tanz
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
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Abstract

Children's apparent ‘errors’ in interpreting ask as tell, incidentally uncovered in C. Chomsky's research on syntactic development, and subsequently interpreted in terms of E. Clark's theory of semantic development, are re-interpreted in the framework of pragmatic development. An experiment is reported in which a single coherent discourse framework is imposed and one pragmatic factor is manipulated: children's knowledge of the answers to the questions they are supposed to relay. The results confirm the hypothesis that if the children do not know the information, they relay the question, i.e. ask. If they do know the answer, they supply it, i.e. tell. By literally asking, the children in the ‘don't know’ condition demonstrate that they are capable of decoding ask constructions semantically and syntactically. The tendency of the children in the ‘know’ condition to tell is then interpreted as revealing not semantic confusion but pragmatic skill. The children's responses are discussed in relation to three-person speech acts and indirect requests for information. Children's ability to interpret utterances non-literally has implications for conducting experiments with literal instructions and these are also discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , February 1983 , pp. 187 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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Footnotes

[*]

Portions of this paper were presented at the Third International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Vancouver, August 1981. I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Joyce Swarner and Roxanne Preble in collecting the data. Address for correspondence: Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721.

References

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