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Sociopragmatic development
in the preschool years:
the links with prosodic and gestural abilities
and Theory of Mind
Mariia Pronina
PhD Research Plan
Supervised by:
Pilar Prieto
ICREA - Department of Translation and Language Sciences,
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
February 11th, 2019
Mariia Pronina
PhD Research Plan
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to give a special thanks to my supervisor Pilar Prieto for
all her time, support, guidance and the encouragement during the course of this work. Pilar
Prieto together with Iris Hübscher originated some of the projects presented in the current PhD
proposal. I would also like to thank Iris Hübscher for her tangible help with preparing of the
experiments: designing and filming some materials, and running the pilots with me. I owe my
gratitude to Joan Borràs-Comes for helping with statistics. Special thanks to Patrick Rohrer for
proofreading my work. And thanks to all members of the Prosodic Studies Group, Florence
Baills, Peng Li, Patrick Rohrer, Ïo Valls, Ingrid Vilà-Giménez, and Yuan Zhang for their
comments and support. I am also very thankful to the committee member for my PhD research
plan defense Wolfram Hinzen, Alfonso Igualada and Núria Esteve-Gibert for their valuable and
insightful comments and suggestions that I benefited enormously from.
I am grateful to the schools where the experiments were conducted (Escola Antoni Brusi
and Escola Bogatell in Barcelona and Escola Verd in Girona) as well as to the children who
participated in the study and their parents. I am also indebted to research assistants Eva Castillo,
Anna Massanas and Ainhoa David for their help with the administration of the tests. I would
also like to thank Ernesto Rodríguez for the illustrations of the APT and Alona Lukina and
Valentin Sotskov for providing me with the python script for group distribution. I would like
to particularly thank Anna Massanas for her help with the recording of the materials, for
carrying out the training sessions, and for her willingness to work with us on this project.
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PhD Research Plan
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................................. I
RESUM ................................................................................................................................... III
RESUMEN ............................................................................................................................... V
1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 1
1.1. OBJECT OF ANALYSIS ...................................................................................................... 1
1.2. PRIOR WORK.................................................................................................................... 1
1.2.1. Multimodal foundations of sociopragmatic development in the first language 1
1.2.1.1. Early preverbal period .................................................................................... 1
1.2.1.2. Verbal period ................................................................................................... 8
1.2.2. ToM development and its links with other cognitive and linguistic abilities .. 21
1.2.2.1. ToM development .......................................................................................... 21
1.2.2.2. The links between ToM and language ......................................................... 23
1.2.2.3. The links between ToM and emotion understanding ................................. 29
1.2.2.4. Training studies to promote ToM ................................................................ 31
2. GOALS OF THE DISSERTATION ................................................................................. 34
3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK .................................................................................... 35
3.1. THE USAGE-BASED THEORY OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION ........................................... 35
3.2. EMBODIED COGNITION .................................................................................................. 37
4. HYPOTHESES ................................................................................................................... 39
4.1. STUDY 1 ......................................................................................................................... 39
4.2. STUDY 2 ......................................................................................................................... 40
4.3. STUDY 3 ......................................................................................................................... 41
4.4. STUDY 4 ......................................................................................................................... 42
5. EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES ........................................................................................... 43
5.1. STUDY 1: SOCIOPRAGMATIC COMPETENCE IN PRESCHOOLERS AND ITS LINK WITH
OTHER ABILITIES .................................................................................................................. 43
5.1.1 Research question .................................................................................................. 43
5.1.2. Participants ........................................................................................................... 43
5.1.3. Materials ................................................................................................................ 44
5.1.4. Procedure .............................................................................................................. 46
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PhD Research Plan
5.1.5. Expected results .................................................................................................... 49
5.2. STUDY 2: A CORRELATIONAL EXAMINATION OF THE LINK BETWEEN CHILDREN’S
IMITATION SKILLS AND THEIR SOCIOPRAGMATIC ABILITIES ............................................. 50
5.2.1. Research question ................................................................................................. 50
5.2.2. Participants ........................................................................................................... 50
5.2.3. Materials ................................................................................................................ 50
5.2.4. Set up and procedure ........................................................................................... 51
5.2.5. Coding .................................................................................................................... 52
5.2.6. Summary of results ............................................................................................... 53
5.3. STUDY 3: DEVELOPMENTAL TRAJECTORIES OF PROSODY AND GESTURE IN THEIR
EXPRESSION OF SOCIOPRAGMATIC MEANINGS: A CROSS-SECTIONAL STUDY .................... 54
5.3.1 Research question .................................................................................................. 54
5.3.2. Participants ........................................................................................................... 54
5.3.3. Materials and procedure ...................................................................................... 54
5.3.4. Results .................................................................................................................... 54
5.4. STUDY 4: THE ROLE OF ENACTMENT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRAGMATIC ABILITIES
AND TOM: A TRAINING STUDY ............................................................................................. 58
5.4.1. Research question ................................................................................................. 58
5.4.2. Participants ........................................................................................................... 58
5.4.3. Materials ................................................................................................................ 58
5.4.4. Experimental procedure ...................................................................................... 59
5.4.5. Expected results .................................................................................................... 63
6. WORK PLAN ..................................................................................................................... 64
7. SELECTED REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 66
8. FULL BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................... 69
Appendix A: The Audiovisual Pragmatic Test (APT) ........................................................ 88
Appendix B: Sample story of the training materials (Study 4) .......................................... 91
Appendix C: Script for group distribution (Study 4) .......................................................... 92
Appendix D: Annotation system of online recoding of training sessions (Study 4) .......... 93
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ABSTRACT
By its very nature, human communication is multimodal and relies on a dynamic
information exchange involving not only speech content but also prosodic and gestural features.
While a substantial amount of research has shown that gesture and prosody play a bootstrapping
role at early stages of language acquisition (Goldin-Meadow, 1998, 2014; see de Carvalho,
Dautriche, Millotte, & Christophe, 2018 for a review), little is known about the role played by
gesture and prosody in children’s later linguistic and sociopragmatic development (see
Hübscher, 2018 for a review).
The main goal of the current PhD thesis is to explore preschoolers’ sociopragmatic
development and its relation to multimodal prosodic and gestural abilities, as well as to Theory
of Mind (ToM), the capacity to attribute mental states – e.g., beliefs, intentions, knowledge –to
others, and emotion understanding. To date, the complex relationship between these
components – namely sociopragmatic abilities, multimodal prosodic and gestural abilities,
ToM, and the ability to recognize emotions – remains unclear (see Bosco, Tirassa, & Gabbatore,
2018 for a review). Moreover, the present thesis will also assess whether sociopragmatic
abilities, ToM and emotion comprehension skills can be trained through an embodied
intervention involving multimodal enactment of language.
The present PhD thesis is comprised of four empirical studies with preschool children.
Study 1 will assess whether sociopragmatic abilities in a group of 3- to 4-year-old preschool
children are correlated with ToM, emotion understanding and language skills (semantics,
syntax, narrative abilities). Study 2 will assess whether sociopragmatic abilities in a group of 3
to 4-year-old preschool children are tied to multimodal imitation abilities (understood as the
ability to jointly imitate prosody, gesture and lexical content). Study 3 has the goal of jointly
exploring prosodic and gestural developmental trajectories in their expression of
sociopragmatic meanings in two age groups, namely 3- to 4-year-old children and 5- to 6-year-
old children. Finally, Study 4 will assess the effects of training 3- to 4- year-old children to use
prosodic and gestural patterns while enacting mental states and emotions on sociopragmatic
and ToM development.
All in all, this PhD thesis aims to explore sociopragmatic development in typically
developing preschool children and its links with ToM, multimodal production abilities and
other language skills. The results of the four studies will assess the relation between these
capacities and the role that gesture and prosody play in this picture. The main underlying
hypothesis of this thesis is that children’s multimodal abilities are strongly related to their
sociopragmatic competence, and that secondarily these abilities are related to overall linguistic
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development and mind-reading abilities. Moreover, given this relationship, we hypothesize that
strengthening perspective-taking abilities through embodied and language training
interventions will serve to boost both ToM as well as linguistic capacities that require
perspective-taking skills. This PhD thesis will not only lead to widening the body of literature
on sociopragmatic development, ToM, and multimodal but will also develop a tool to aid
preschool teachers in incorporating aspects of embodiment into their classroom.
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RESUM
Per la seva pròpia naturalesa, la comunicació humana és multimodal i es basa en un
intercanvi dinàmic d’informació que inclou no només la parla sinó també elements prosòdics i
gestuals. Mentre una gran quantitat de recerca ha demostrat que gest i prosòdia representen un
paper promotor en etapes primerenques d’adquisició del llenguatge (Goldin-Meadow, 1998,
2014; v. de Carvalho, Dautriche, Millotte, & Christophe, 2018 per una revisió), se sap poc sobre
el paper del gest i la prosòdia en el desenvolupament lingüístic i sociopragmàtic més tardà (v.
Hübscher, 2018 per una revisió).
L’objectiu principal d’aquesta tesi és investigar el desenvolupament sociopragmàtic dels
nens d’edat preescolar i la seva relació amb les habilitats prosòdiques i gestuals, com també
amb la Teoria de la Ment (ToM), entesa la capacitat d’atribuir estats mentals – e.g., creences,
intencions, coneixement – a d’altres persones, i amb la comprensió d’emocions. A hores d’ara,
encara s’està discutint a complexa relació entre aquests components, és a dir, l’habilitat
sociopragmàtica, les habilitats multimodals prosòdiques i gestuals, ToM, i l’habilitat de
reconèixer emocions no està clara (v. Bosco, Tirassa, & Gabbatore, 2018 per una revisió). A
més, aquesta tesi també analitzarà si les habilitats sociopragmàtiques, ToM i la capacitat de
comprensió d’emocions poden entrenar-se mitjançant una intervenció corporeïtzada que
potencia l’ús de la multimodalitat en l’aprenentatge del llenguatge.
Aquesta tesi inclou quatre estudis empírics amb nens d’edat preescolar. L’estudi 1
investigarà si les habilitats sociopragmàtiques dels nens de 3 i 4 anys es correlacionen amb la
ToM, amb la comprensió d’emocions i amb altres habilitats lingüístiques (semàntica, sintaxi,
habilitats narratives). L’estudi 2 examinarà si les habilitats sociopragmàtiques dels nens de 3 i
4 anys estan lligades amb l’habilitat d’imitació multimodal (entesa com l’habilitat d’imitar
conjuntament prosòdia, gestos i contingut lèxic). L’estudi 3 té com a objectiu explorar
trajectòries de desenvolupament conjunt de la prosòdia i el gest en la seva expressió
sociopragmàtica en dos grups d’edat, específicament, en nens de 3 a 4 anys i en nens de 5 a 6
anys. Finalment, l’estudi 4 avaluarà l’efecte de 8 sessions d’entrenament de representació
d’emocions i estats mentals usant patrons prosòdics i gestuals en la millora de les habilitats
sociopragmàtiques i de ToM en nens d’edat preescolar de 3 i 4 anys.
En resum, la finalitat d’aquesta tesi és investigar el desenvolupament sociopragmàtic en
nens d’edat preescolar i la seva relació amb ToM, amb les habilitats de producció multimodal
i d’altres habilitats lingüístiques. Els resultats dels quatre estudis avaluaran la relació entre
aquestes capacitats i el paper que juguen la prosòdia i el gest en aquest camp. La hipòtesi general
que guia la tesi és que les habilitats multimodals de nens estan estrictament relacionades amb
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PhD Research Plan
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la competència sociopragmàtica i, de forma secundaria, aquestes habilitats estan relacionades
amb el desenvolupament lingüístic general i l’habilitat de presa de perspectiva. Així mateix,
donada aquesta relació, proposem les habilitats de presa de perspectiva dels nens es poden
enfortir mitjançant una intervenció d’entrenament corporeïtzat i basat en la conversa. Aquesta
tesi no només conduirà a l’ampliació del nostre coneixement sobre el desenvolupament
sociopragmàtic i multimodal i el desenvolupament de la ToM, sinó també desenvoluparà eines
per ajudar als mestres de l'etapa infantil a incorporar aspectes de multimodalitat a l’aula.
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RESUMEN
Per su propia naturaleza, la comunicación humana es multimodal y se basa en un
intercambio dinámico de información que incluye no solo el habla sino también elementos
prosódicos y gestuales. Mientras muchas investigaciones han demostrado que gesto y prosodia
juegan un papel precursor del lenguaje en etapas tempranas de la adquisición (Goldin-Meadow,
1998, 2014; v. de Carvalho, Dautriche, Millotte, & Christophe, 2018 por una revisión), se sabe
poco sobre el papel del gesto y la prosodia en el desarrollo lingüístico y sociopragmático más
tardío (v. Hübscher, 2018 per una revisión).
El objetivo principal de esta tesis es investigar el desarrollo sociopragmático de los niños
de edad preescolar y su relación con las habilidades prosódicas y gestuales, como también su
relación con la comprensión de emociones y la Teoría de la Mente (ToM), entendida comola
capacitad de atribuir estados mentales – e.g., creencias, intenciones, conocimiento – a otras
personas. A día de hoy, todavía se está discutiendo la compleja relación entre estos
componentes, es decir, la habilidad sociopragmática, las habilidades multimodales prosódicas
y gestuales, la ToM, y la habilidad de reconocer emociones (v. Bosco, Tirassa, & Gabbatore,
2018 per una revisión). Además, esta tesis también analizará si las habilidades
sociopragmáticas, ToM y la capacidad de comprensión de emociones pueden entrenarse
mediante una intervención corporeizada que potencia el uso de la multimodalidad en el
aprendizaje del lenguaje.
Esta tesis incluye cuatro estudios empíricos llevados a cabo con niños de edad preescolar.
El estudio 1 investigará si las habilidades sociopragmáticas de los niños de 3 y 4 años se
correlacionan con la ToM, la comprensión de emociones y con otras habilidades lingüísticas
(semántica, sintaxis y habilidades narrativas). El estudio 2 examinará si las habilidades
sociopragmáticas de los niños de 3 y 4 años se correlacionan con sus habilidades de imitación
multimodal (entendidos como la habilidad de imitar conjuntamente prosodia, gestos y
contenido léxico). El estudio 3 tiene como objetivo explorar las trayectorias de desarrollo
conjunto de la prosodia y el gesto en su expresión sociopragmática en dos grupos de edad,
específicamente, en niños de 3 a 4 años y en niños de 5 a 6 años. Finalmente, el estudio 4
evaluará el efecto de 8 sesiones de entrenamiento potenciador de la actuación multimodal de
las emociones y estados mentales por parte de los niños en edad preescolar en la mejora de sus
habilidades sociopragmáticas y de ToM.
En resumen, la finalidad de esta tesis es investigar el desarrollo sociopragmático en niños
de edad preescolar y su relación con la ToM, con las habilidades de producción multimodal y
con otras habilidades lingüísticas. Los resultados de los cuatro estudios evaluarán la relación
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entre estas capacidades y el papel que juegan la prosodia y el gesto en este campo. La hipótesis
general que guía la tesis es que las habilidades multimodales de niños están estrictamente
relacionadas con la competencia sociopragmática y, de forma secundaria, estas habilidades
están relacionadas con el desarrollo lingüístico general y la habilidad de toma de perspectiva.
Asimismo, dada esta relación, proponemos las habilidades de toma de perspectiva de los niños
se pueden fortalecer mediante una intervención de entrenamiento corporeizado y basado en la
conversación. Esta tesis no solo conducirá a la ampliación de nuestro conocimiento sobre el
desarrollo sociopragmático y multimodal y el desarrollo de la ToM, sino también desarrollará
herramientas para ayudar a los maestros de la etapa infantil a incorporar aspectos de
multimodalidad en el aula.
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1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Object of analysis
The research presented in this PhD thesis broadly examines the interface between the
sociopragmatic and linguistic faculties in preschoolers, as well as their capacity to attribute
mental states to others (e.g., beliefs, intentions, knowledge) – also called theory of mind (ToM),
and, importantly, the role played by gestural and prosodic development in this picture.
Following Leech (1983), Thomas (1981, 1983) and more recently Culpeper (2010) and many
pragmatic textbooks, the present PhD thesis will use the term sociopragmatics to reflect the fact
that the field of pragmatics not only covers the study of more general pragmatic meanings, but
that a central concern of the pragmatic field also involves the speakers’ social identities (see for
example the politeness section in 1.2.1.2.). As Andrés-Roqueta & Katsos (2017) claim,
sociopragmatic skills allow children to comprehend sentences appropriately to the
conversational context and enable them to produce sentences appropriate to communicative
situation. The use of the term sociopragmatics thus highlights the important role played by
social factors and their influence in pragmatic aspects of language.
A set of four independent empirical studies will be conducted to explore sociopragmatic
development in preschoolers and their links with language, ToM and multimodal production
and perception abilities. The first two studies will test the potential correlation between
childrens’ sociopragmatic abilities on one hand, and (a) a specific linguistic skills and ToM
capacity (Study 1), and (b) prosody and gesture imitation abilities (Study 2) on the other. The
third study will provide a detailed examination of the developmental path of prosodic and
gestural cues used by preschoolers to encode sociopragmatic meanings. The last study will use
an embodied intervention (i.e., the active involvement of the body, prosody and voice) to
investigate its beneficial effect on the development of perspective-taking skills, linguistic
capacities, and sociopragmatic abilities in preschoolers.
1.2. Prior work
1.2.1. Multimodal foundations of sociopragmatic development in the first language
1.2.1.1. Early preverbal period
By its very nature, human communication is multimodal and relies on a dynamic
information exchange involving not only speech content but also prosodic and gestural features.
It is therefore not surprising that children become capable communicators well before they start
to speak. Communication in the preverbal stage of life constitutes one of the foundations for
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the later development of linguistic and pragmatic skills. As Tomasello, Carpenter, &
Liszkowski’s 2007 pointed out, “children’s early linguistic skills are built on this already
existing platform of prelinguistic communication”. This section will review the main stages of
early communicative development by highlighting the strong multimodal components which
compose these early stages (focusing on prosodic and gestural patterns).
During this first period of pragmatic acquisition, the infant communication system
strongly relies on nonverbal cues such as gaze, facial expression and prosody. Early patterns of
face perception and imitation, as well as understanding that faces can convey significant
communicative information, is fundamental for early communicative development. Newborns
prefer to look at faces (Johnson & Morton, 1991) and almost immediately after birth, infants
can imitate certain facial gestures, namely tongue protrusions and mouth opening gestures
(Meltzoff & Moore, 1989). Furthermore, by six weeks of age, infants are able to imitate facial
expressions 24 hours after they were originally presented (Meltzoff & Moore, 1994). In addition
to visual preference for faces, infants orient attention to eye-like stimuli and, crucially, display
a preference for eye contact (Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan, & Ahluwalia,
2000). Moreover, they prefer direct gaze rather than averted gaze (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, &
Johnson, 2002). These early communicative behaviors underlie future linguistic and social
development. For instance, it has been demonstrated that infants’ gaze-following behavior
predicts their later vocabulary skills (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2005).
Further, infants show early use of multimodal cues in order to express their own emotions.
By 2 months of age, they start to control prosodic parameters of the speech to signal affective
meaning and can distinguish positive and negative emotion (e.g., use of variations in duration,
pitch range, and pitch peak; laughter for positive emotion and crying for negative emotion)
(Oller et al., 2013; Scheiner, Hammerschmidt, Jürgens, & Zwirner, 2002). At around 4 months,
infants can express such emotions as sadness or enjoyment through facial expression, the ability
to express different emotional states continues to develop, so for example, at 12 months,
children can signal more complex emotion such as surprise and fear (Sullivan & Lewis, 2003).
These outlined studies suggest an early mapping of audiovisual cues onto emotional states.
Towards the sixth to eighth week of life, babies often produce their first smiles and, with
them, the ability to exchange emotions and interact face to face with adults for longer periods
of time progressively comes. According to the usage-based approach to language acquisition
proposed by Tomasello (2005) (see section 3.1.), the social interaction experience is the basis
for linguistic development. The central tenet of this approach is that language structure is
learned through language use. In accordance with a usage-based approach, prelinguistic infants
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develop skills which are fundamental for later language acquisition and do so through
communicative interactions (Tomasello et al., 2007).
Dyadic interaction refers to early interaction which involves infant and caretaker
communicating face-to-face in a bidirectional way and represents one of the foundations of
language development (Nwokah, 2014). During the period of dyadic interaction, infants show
preference for affect (Trevarthen, 1979) which also constitutes a crucial component of
subsequent language development since experience of affect enables children “to appreciate
that others are similar to, responsive to, and engaged with them” (Markova & Legerstee, 2008,
p. 27). Within this period, infants develop perceptive prosodic skills related to affect. By 5
months of age, infants are shown to rely on the audiovisual information in the perception of
emotional states. They can discriminate between affective vocal expressions (approval,
negative affect), show different reactions to different affective stimuli and are able to match
facial expressions with corresponding acoustic properties of the speech (Fernald, 1993;
Vaillant-Molina, Bahrick, & Flom, 2013). These abilities continue to develop later on. For
example, the study by Hoicka & Wang (2011) tested sensitivity to vocal cues in 15-months-old
infants and found that they can differentiate positive emotional vocal cues from humorous ones
and match them to intentional actions.
It is well established that at around nine months of age, a shift occurs from dyadic to
triadic communication (e.g., the so-called ‘attentional triad’, see Meltzoff, 2002; Tomasello,
1995; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005). In triadic communications, apart from
infant and caregiver, some external object or event becomes involved in communication. The
coordination of the attention of two individuals to the same object is defined as joint attention
(Carpenter, 2012), since both individuals need to realize to some extent they are sharing
attention. Joint attention is crucial for communicative and language development. The first
signs of joint attention behaviors are observed in infants at around 9–12 months. As described
in the seminal work by Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello (1998), infants first show competence
in sharing attention to objects, even though they can point or follow adult’s gaze, the main
characteristic of these joint attention episodes is infant’s alternation of the gaze between object
and adult. Between 12 and 15 months of age, infants are able to follow attention to objects by
gaze and point following. They also begin to make use of information about adult gaze direction
to predict others’ future actions (Phillips, Wellman, & Spelke, 2002). Finally, infants become
able not only to follow adult’s gaze and gesture but also to direct the adult’s attention to objects
in which they themselves are interested by pointing at them. Over time, joint attention increases
in amount and changes its form and focus, and notably develops into the third year of life and
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beyond as children become able to sustain complex conversations (Adamson & Dimitrova,
2014).
Parental scaffolding is particularly important during this period. Although early infant
vocalizations lack illocutionary force (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) being perlocutionary acts,
caregivers tend to attribute intentions to such utterances and seek out conversational structure
and turn-taking sequences (e.g., Snow, 1977). Caregivers lead the communication; however,
infant’s behavior and preferences show that they also are motivated to communicate. For
example, as noted above, infants have preferences for face-like and eye-like stimuli and show
imitative behavior. Infants also demonstrate a preference for contingency (Toda & Fogel, 1993)
and attempt to continue communication by smiling and vocalizing, something which is essential
for communicative development.
A wealth of studies has shown that children’s pointing gestures are central to the
expression of triadic communication and are strongly tied to later lexical development. For
example, Brooks & Meltzoff (2008) demonstrated that infants’ gaze following and pointing
skills at the age of 10 and 11 months predict their productive vocabulary at two years of age.
The study by Bavin et al. (2008) supported these findings, showing a significant correlation
between early communicative behaviors and vocabulary development in a large sample of
children. They analyzed gesture and object use at one year of age and found that this was a
predictor of vocabulary development at age two years. Caselli, Rinaldi, Stefanini, & Volterra
(2012) explored early actions and “gesture vocabulary”, i.e., gestures referring to lexical items,
in Italian infants (8–18 months) and provided evidence that early gesture correlates not only
with word production but also with word comprehension. Further, Rowe & Goldin-Meadow
(2009) observed infant’s interaction with their caregivers and found that children’s gesture
vocabulary at 18 months, specifically various meanings conveyed in gesture, predicts verbal
vocabulary size at 42 months. Moreover, Iverson & Goldin-Meadow (2005) conducted a
longitudinal stufy with children between the ages of 10 and 24 months and showed that lexical
items (e.g., ball, cup, flower) that a child produces in gesture appear earlier in the child’s verbal
lexicon.
One of the important skills that emerges between 7 and 9 months of age is intentionality
and intention reading. Infants start to demonstrate the ability to differentiate between means
and goals in their own and others’ productions. According to Tomasello (1995), this entails that
infants are able to distinguish between an action, the mean, and the intention underlying this
action, the goal. Previous research has shown that infants begin to comprehend actions as goal-
directed and can discern intentional and accidental actions (Hauf, 2007). New behaviors that
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children demonstrate at the end of the first year of life are a signal of their emerging
understanding that other people are intentional agents. In addition to understanding intentions,
importantly, children’s communicative interaction is collaborative. Children are not only
capable of communicating but also of showing interest and enthusiasm to do so and of sharing
goals and intentions with others (Tomasello et al., 2005). This core component of human
communication, referred to as shared intentionality, is what sets human cognition apart.
Warneken, Chen, & Tomasello (2006) tested infants’ and chimpanzees’ engagement in a joint
activity with an adult. When the adult stopped participating in the activity, the chimpanzees did
not continue communication, while children attempted to reengage the adult at least once,
displaying awareness of mutual goals.
Pointing gestures are also an important token in the development of intentionality. As
indicated by Liszkowski (2005), infant pointing draws on the understanding of others as
attentional beings. Bates, Camaioni, & Volterra (1975) established two types of communicative
pointing gestures carrying different intentions: proto-imperatives and proto-declaratives. For
example, children can produce proto-imperative pointing gestures to request the adult to fetch
an object. They can produce proto-declarative pointing gestures (e.g., showing an object to the
adult) to engage the adult in communication and share the experience. Therefore, it is claimed
that two types of pointing do not imply the same cognitive abilities: “whereas imperative
pointing relies on a simple expectation that people will function as causal agents, declarative
pointing implies the capacity to influence the other person’s attentional state about aspects of
the environment and, at the same time, to perceive the other person as capable of understanding
one’s communicative intentions” (Camaioni, Perucchini, Bellagamba, & Colonnesi, 2004, p.
305). Indeed, in a later study, Camaioni et al. (2004) demonstrated that children who are better
in intention understanding produce more declarative pointing, while no relation was found
between imperative pointing and intention inferring.
Other authors have further analyzed the pragmatic intentions that an infant can express
with pointing gestures. For example, Tomasello, Carpenter, & Liszkowski (2007) proposed to
divide proto-declarative gesture into expressive gestures, that are used with purpose of sharing
an attitude towards an object, and informative gestures, that are used with purpose of providing
the lacking information to the adult. Similarly, Kovács, Tauzin, Téglás, Gergely, & Csibra
(2014) proposed that infants can point to an event to express two intentions: either to share their
appreciation of it with the adult or to exhibit the information about it from the adult (epistemic
request).
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In answer to the question of how infants understand the intentions of others, it has been
suggested that they importantly rely on act-preceding information of joint attention scenes
(Tomasello et al., 2007). However, recent studies have also established the relevance of
multimodal cues in infant intention inferring (e.g., Behne, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2005;
Camaioni et al., 2004). For example, Behne et al. (2005) tested whether 14- to 24-month-old
children were able to understand the intention of the adult (i.e., to inform about the location of
the toy) in the context of a hiding game when an adult was ostensively gazing or pointing to a
container with a hidden toy. In the non-communicative condition, the adult gestured toward the
box in a non-communicative manner. The findings indicated that children can distinguish
communicative gestures and facial expressions from non-communicative ones, and, moreover,
they could use these multimodal communicative cues to infer the location of the toy. In another
study, Camaioni et al. (2004) demonstrated that infants differentiate between imperative and
declarative intentions, as they reacted differently to imperative and declarative pointing. Other
studies have shown that infants rely strongly on prosodic cues when detecting intentions.
Carpenter, Akhtar, & Tomasello (1998) examined whether 14- to 18-month-old infants were
able to understand that the caregivers’ speech is intentional only on the basis of speech cues.
The experimenter performed two types of actions: intentional and accidental. The types of
actions differed only in the verbal message. For intentional actions, the expression was ‘There!’
(with appropriate prosody), for accidental actions the expression was ‘Whoops!’ (with
appropriate prosody). The authors found that infants imitated the intentional actions more than
the accidental ones, which led them to the conclusion that infants rely on the prosodic cues to
detect intentional actions. These findings were corroborated by Sakkalou & Gattis (2012). In
their first experiment, they used the action imitation paradigm developed by Carpenter et al.
(1998) in which intentionality is marked with lexical and prosodic cues. Similar to this study,
they found that infants imitated more intentional than accidental actions. In the second
experiment, they removed the lexical cues (the lexical information was presented in Greek).
They found that in the second experiment, older children imitated more intentional actions than
younger infants. The results of both studies showed that infants copied the intentional actions
more often, which suggests that children are able to detect intentionality solely on the basis of
prosodic cues accompanying the action. Similarly, a more recent study by Esteve-Gibert et al.
(2017) demonstrated that 12-month-old children use specific multimodal act-accompanying
cues, in particular prosody and hand shapes, in order to distinguish the expressive, imperative
and informative intents behind their caregiver’s pointing gestures.
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As far as the relationship between prosody and language acquisition is concerned, a body
of studies have looked at the bootstrapping role of prosody for speech stream segmentation into
words (for a review, see Thorson, 2018) and syntactic parsing (de Carvalho, Dautriche, Millotte,
& Christophe, 2018). When interacting with infants, adults usually use Infant-Directed Speech
(henceforth, IDS) which is characterized by slower speech rate and exaggerated pitch variations
(e.g., Fernald & Simon, 1984). These prosodic particularities of IDS help infants to build the
phoneme repertoire (e.g., Werker et al., 2007) and better learn new words (e.g., Ma, Golinkoff,
Houston, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2011), among others. On the syntactic side, prosodic bootstrapping
theories (Gleitman, 1990; Morgan & Demuth, 1996) propose that infants acquire syntax by
processing and acquiring prosodic information. Further, it has been demonstrated that using co-
speech gestures in IDS can also facilitate verbal development (Goodwyn, Acredolo, & Brown,
2000).
With regard to prosody production to express intentionality, research on the early use of
prosodic cues to express pragmatic meanings has shown that in the second half of the first year
of life, children can use different prosodic patterns to signal their intentions (e.g., Esteve-Gibert
& Prieto, 2013; Papaeliou, Minadakis, & Cavouras, 2002; Papaeliou & Trevarthen, 2006, see
Esteve-Gibert & Prieto, 2018 for a complete review). Papaeliou et al. (2002) showed that 7- to
11-month-old infants use distinct prosodic cues (duration, F0) to produce emotional
vocalization and vocalizations with pragmatic intent. Another study by Papaeliou & Trevarthen
(2006) complemented these findings by identifying different prosodic patterns used by the
babbling infants to produce communicative versus investigative vocalizations. Further, Esteve-
Gibert & Prieto (2013) analyzed a longitudinal corpus of Catalan-babbling infants and found
that infants can express intentionality by using distinct prosodic patterns. Their findings showed
that pitch range and duration patterns of vocalizations signal their communicative and
pragmatic intentions. So, unlike investigative vocalizations, communicative vocalizations were
shorter and had a wider pitch range. In turn, the pitch and duration patterns of communicative
vocalizations depended on the intention (request or expression of discontent versus response or
statement).
Furthermore, the joint production of pointing gestures and accompanying vocalizations
was examined in several studies (Aureli et al., 2017; Grünloh & Liszkowski, 2015; Murillo &
Capilla, 2016; Murillo, Ortega, Otones, Rujas, & Casla, 2018). Aureli et al. (2017) investigated
how infants accompany their intentional gestures with prosody and demonstrated that 12-
month-old Italian-learning infants already display pointing-vocal coupling and that the match
between these two modalities gradually becomes more attuned. Grünloh & Liszkowski (2015)
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examined point-accompanying characteristics (vocalizations, hand shape) elicited in
laboratory-controlled situations produced by Dutch 14-month-olds. They found that the
prosodic characteristics of infants’ vocalizations distinguish requestive acts from expressive
and informative ones, in the same way pointing hand shapes do. The authors also reported that
when requesting, pointing infants use distinct vocalizations depending on the distance of the
referent. Relatedly, Murillo & Capilla (2016) analyzed communicative abilities in infants in an
integrated fashion. Their results showed that with declarative pointing, Spanish infants
produced a flat intonation and with requestive pointing, they produced a rising intonation.
The coordination between the acoustic and visual language dimensions emerges by the
end of the babbling period and is particularly important in language development. Esteve-Gibert
& Prieto (2014) found that at this stage there is temporal coordination between gesture and
speech in an adult-like way: gesture onset occurs before speech onset. Interestingly, Igualada,
Bosch, & Prieto (2015) found that the ability to successfully use gesture–speech integration
(i.e., the ability to produce simultaneous gesture–speech combinations) is also related to later
lexical and grammatical development. Taken together, these findings show that children’s use
of prosody and pointing gestures, as well as the ability to combine them, predict later linguistic
outcomes.
All in all, the results reviewed in this section suggest that at the preverbal stages, children
heavily rely on multimodal aspects of communication reflecting pragmatic meanings such as
prosody, facial expression, eye gaze and manual gestures. Alongside with joint attention skills
and the ability for shared intentionality, gestural and prosodic cues play an important role in
children’s pragmatic development, and, moreover, constitute a bootstrapping step for acquiring
language. The ability to access and express pragmatic meanings through prosody and gesture
continues to develop over a long period. The next section will review the studies focusing on
the later stages sociopragmatic development of children and its multimodal foundations.
1.2.1.2. Verbal period
Even though less research has been carried out on the role of gesture and prosody in later
stages of sociopragmatic development, evidence points to the fact that they continue to boost
language processing and learning. For example, Igualada, Esteve-Gibert & Prieto (2017)
demonstrated that preschoolers benefit from beat gestures in a word learning task recalling the
focused word better when it is accompanied by a beat gesture (see Hübscher & Prieto, submitted
for review). Looking at syntactic acquisition, research has investigated the relation between
gesture-plus-word combination and two-word combinations. Studies by Iverson & Goldin-
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Meadow (2005) and Özçalişkan & Goldin-Meadow (2005) found that the use of gesture-word
combinations conveying a word and a supplementary gesture in a proposition predicts the
transition to the two-word stage. That is, the child who first produces this particular type of
gesture-speech combination is also first to produce two-word combinations. In addition, Rowe
& Goldin-Meadow (2009) also showed that the number of gesture-speech combinations is a
predictor of later verbal sentence complexity. While most of the studies explore infant’s
pointing gestures, fewer studies have investigated other types of gesture. Importantly, there is
another frequent type of gesture that emerges in children between 1 and 2 years of age, e.g., the
so-called refusal gestures. Refusal gestures appear as the response to questions by the middle
of the second year before the emergence of the corresponding verbal expressions (Volterra &
Antinucci, 1979). By two years of age, children use conventional refusal gestures, such as head
shakes, and start to combine them with vocalizations, and then with words (Guidetti, 2000,
2005). In a longitudinal study, Guidetti (2002) analyzed gestures used by infants between 16
and 36 months and found that gestures of refusal and agreement were the most frequent
alongside pointing in children’s interactions with their mothers. For example, Kettner &
Carpendale (2013) provided evidence that between 13 and 15 months, children start to shake
the head for no, and later, between 16 and 18 months, they are already able to nod the head
for yes. Together with pointing gesture, refusal gesture has been shown to act as precursors of
language development (e.g., Beaupoil-Hourdel, Morgenstern, & Boutet, 2015; Guidetti, 2000,
2005; Morgenstern, Beaupoil-Hourdel, Blondel, & Dominique, 2016), specifically in early
development of negation. For instance, it has been shown that the first negative constructions
emerge with early gestures of rejection and avoidance (Beaupoil-Hourdel et al., 2015).
Similarly, Morgenstern et al. (2016) analyzed multimodal path into negation in both hearing
and deaf children, and although there were individual differences, they found that gesture is an
important component in the itineraries. Thus, children enter verbal modality of negation through
the use of gesture and afterwards children use negation gestures to reinforce or complement
spoken utterances.
In relation to iconic gestures, one study by Özçalişkan, Gentner, & Goldin-Meadow
(2012) found that, unlike the onset of pointing gestures, iconic gestures appear much later,
generally at around 25 months, when children have already started to produce their first words.
The findings indicate that children first acquire the verb system and then are able to use iconic
gesture to increase their repertoire of action meanings.
This section will review research that provides evidence that children continue relying
strongly on multimodal aspects of communication after they begin to produce first words, while
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highlighting the importance of the precursory role of prosodic and gestural cues for later
sociopragmatic development. The subsections below review a variety of pragmatic areas that
develop during preschool years, namely speech act marking, focus and informational structure,
epistemic and emotional states, politeness, pragmatic inferences and irony, and discourse
abilities such as narratives and turn-taking (see also Hübscher & Prieto submitted for a review).
Speech acts
Speech act development can be considered one of the pragmatic milestones achieved in
infancy. While proto-declaratives serve as the antecedents of later statements and questions,
proto-imperative serve as antecedents of emerging orders and demands (Ninio, 2014). Ninio &
Wheeler (1984) developed a pragmatic coding taxonomy (i.e., the Inventory of Communicative
Acts, INCA) which has been widely applied by a number of researchers (see Cameron-
Faulkner, 2014 for a summary). Their findings established the gradual emergence of the speech
acts. Noteworthy, many scholars still point out that the classification of speech act categories
of young children’s utterances is often challenging.
As mentioned in the preceding section, studies on early pragmatic development have
brought evidence that infants are able to distinguish between the communicative intentions of
others (e.g., imperative, expressive, informative) by associating specific prosodic and gestural
cues with specific speech acts (e.g., Behne, Liszkowski, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2012; Esteve-
Gibert et al., 2017; see Liszkowski, 2014 for a review). Moreover, infants can also express
proto-speech acts (e.g., proto-imperative and proto-declarative, see Bates et al., 1975; see also
Esteve-Gibert & Prieto, 2013; Tomasello et al., 2007). Proto-speech acts appear at around 10
months and they are first expressed through gesture and intentional vocalizations, suggesting
that gestural and prosodic cues play a key role in the development of speech acts.
Studies on intonational development confirm that intonation acts might be a precursor of
speech act marking expressed verbally. By the age of 2 years, infants produce two-word
combinations and have a full repertoire of pitch accents and boundary tones (Rusiewicz &
Esteve-Gibert, 2018) to express speech acts such as assertion, question or request. Prieto,
Estrella, Thorson, & Vanrell (2012) analyzed a large longitudinal corpus from children between
0;11 and 2;4 acquiring Catalan and Spanish, and assessed the pragmatic meaning of the
intonation patterns. They provided evidence that from the onset of the speech children use a
variety of phonologically distinct intonation contours for particular pragmatic meanings and
over time children master the prosodic properties of the nuclear configurations. It is important
to note that from the beginning the pragmatic meanings conveyed by intonation patterns are
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also adult-like. For instance, Catalan children use target-like intonation patterns for vocatives
and interrogatives (rising contours) and produce complex intonation patterns in an adult-like
way to express request, insistence or discontent. Similarly, Frota, Matos, Cruz, & Vigário
(2016) found that Portuguese children at the age between 1 and 2 years appropriately produce
phonologically distinct intonation patterns which reflect basic speech acts such as statements,
vocatives and requests.
On the whole, gestural and prosodic cues to speech acts develop first, and then children
acquire language-specific intonational patterns used to express particular types of speech acts,
showing early development of the intonational grammar of the ambient language.
The development of speech act understanding continues in the preschool years. By the
age of 3 years children demonstrate understanding of the underlying features of speech acts
(Rakoczy & Tomasello, 2009). This ability has been proposed to be associated with Theory of
Mind abilities since the interpretation of some speech acts entails inferential processes (see
section 1.2.2. for more details). Concerning indirect speech acts, i.e., speech acts that represent
a mismatch between form and function, contradictory findings are found in the developmental
literature. A common view is that at the age of 3 years children can understand indirect speech
acts, especially indirect requests (e.g., Bucciarelli, Colle, & Bara, 2003; Shatz, 1978). In
general, the preschool period is characterized by the stabilization of the control of prosodic
features (Rusiewicz & Esteve-Gibert, 2018) and by the acquisition of more complex pragmatic
meanings, as the ones that will be reviewed in the following section.
Focus and information structure
The ability to understand specific pragmatic meanings such as the informational structure
of an utterance also has a long developmental trajectory. It has been argued that the
comprehension of focus prosody takes time to develop. More specifically, contrastive
interpretation of pitch prominence is observed in children only after the age of six (Ito, Bibyk,
Wagner, & Speer, 2014; Ito, Jincho, Minai, Yamane, & Mazuka, 2012; Speer & Ito, 2009; for
an updated review, see Ito, 2018). Children’s difficulty in interpreting contrastive prosody
cannot be explained by limited perceptive abilities given their sensitivity to prosodic features
from the very first stages of life (Christophe, Mehler, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2001; Decasper &
Spence, 1986; Nazzi, Bertoncini, & Mehler, 1998, among many others; see also section
1.2.1.1.). In a recent study, Kurumada & Clark (2017) argued that this difficulty may be
attributed to an underdeveloped ability to identify possible alternative expressions to create a
contrast. However, the authors found that when an alternative is contextually provided, 4-year-
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old children are capable to understand intonational meaning intended and thus arrive at the
implicature. Based on their findings, it can be concluded that preschool children can identify
relevant information and appropriately interpret informational status of referents by means of
prosodic cues. Moreover, there is other evidence that focus may be acquired much earlier. For
example, it has been shown that younger children, specifically under the age of 2, rely on
prosodic cues to focus in word learning, thus, prosodic prominence expressing focus boost
language acquisition (e.g., Fernald & Mazzie, 1991; Thorson & Morgan, 2014).
On the production side, along the same lines, mixed results have been reported regarding
the age at which children start to use prosodic prominence to mark focus, ranging from 3 to 6
(see Chen, 2018 for a review). However, studies on early intonational development have
demonstrated that even younger children (under the age of 2) are able to use prosodic cues to
mark emphasis and novelty (e.g., Frota & Butler, 2018; Murillo & Capilla, 2016; for an
overview, see Hübscher & Prieto, submitted). Hübscher & Prieto (submitted) and Snow (2017)
proposed that intonation and gesture “act as sister systems in the signaling of information
focus”, suggesting that even young infants can express focus by pointing and pitch prominence
(see also results of Igualada et al., 2015). In later stages, between 4 and 5 years of age, gestural
patterns change. Children of this age begin to use manual beat gestures (i.e., rhythmic non-
representational movements of hand, arm or head associated with prosodic prominence) to
highlight information (Hübscher & Prieto, submitted). The use of prosodic prominence
accompanied by beat gestures is a step forward in the development of gesture-speech
integration to mark focus information. Contrastive focus marking takes longer to develop. A
study by Esteve-Gibert, Lœvenbruck, Dohen, & D’Imperio (2017) showed that before starting
to use prosodic means to mark contrastive focus, preeschol-age children are already able to use
gestural cues to express it (e.g., head nods).
In short, research suggests that although the development of focus is a long process, even
preverbal children can comprehend and express infromational structure to a certain extent. On
the perception side, they benefit from prosodic cues in lexical learning and in contrastive focus
comprehension. On the production side, they are able to combine prosodic and gestural cues to
mark focus since early stages of communicative development, and older children continue
developing the ability to integrate multimodal cues (early use of beat gestures) to express focus.
Epistemic states
Looking at the children’s acquisition of knowledge state (i.e., epistemic meanings),
previous studies indicate that by the age of 2, children can understand the epistemic state of
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others (e.g., knowledgeable versus ignorant partners, see Liszkowski, Carpenter, & Tomasello,
2008) and by the age of 3 years, they are able to distinguish between reliable and unreliable
information (Koenig & Harris, 2005). However, only later, at around 4 years of age, children
can understand speaker knowledge state encoded by lexical markers, either mental verbs or
modal expressions (Moore, Bryant, & Furrow, 1989; Moore, Pure, & Furrow, 1990; see also
Hübscher & Prieto, submitted).
In this context, research has shown that multimodal cues act as epistemic precursors of
later lexical marking of epistemic meanings (Armstrong, Esteve-Gibert, Hübscher, Igualada, &
Prieto, in press; Bartz, 2017; Hübscher, Esteve-Gibert, Igualada, & Prieto, 2017; Kim, Paulus,
Sodian, & Proust, 2016). Some evidence has supported that even young children can signal
their own epistemic states through gestural cues. For instance, in a longitudinal study with
infants from 14 to 42 months, Bartz (2017) showed that at the age of 2, children start to signal
their ignorance with gestures (e.g., flip their palms to the side), moreover, verbal cues to
ignorance appear later. Furthermore, Kim et al. (2016) assessed the presence of uncertainty
gestures in preschool children (3–4-year-old) and found that while they were not able to express
their knowledge state verbally, they could do it through gesture (e.g., shrugging shoulders,
looking away, shaking the head). A recent study conducted by Hübscher et al. (2017) examined
the relative contributions of lexical and multimodal cues to preschoolers’ uncertainty
comprehension. Three- to five-year-old children participated in a knowledge state
comprehension task in which they were asked to decide about speaker belief state. Crucially,
the materials contained lexical, intonational and gestural markers. The results showed that
children detected uncertainty better when gestural cues were presented. Moreover, younger
children were found to be more sensitive to prosodic markers of speaker uncertainty than to
lexical markers. The authors suggested that prosodic and gestural cues play a bootstrapping role
in children early epistemic development. By the same token, Armstrong et al. (2018) found that
preschoolers better understood speaker’s incredulity, another type of belief state, when encoded
in both prosody and gesture, suggesting that the two cues develop in a parallel way.
A follow-up study by Hübscher, Vincze, & Prieto (under review) investigated preschool
children’s production of uncertain knowledge. Similar to the previous experiment, prosodic,
gestural and lexical markers were examined. In a cross-sectional production study with 3- and
5-year-olds, the results showed that the younger group of children (3-year-olds) first used
multimodal cues (i.e., prosodic and gestural cues) to signal their uncertainty, but not lexical
markers.
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To sum up, recent research has provided evidence that epistemic state information is first
expressed through multimodal markers, and that preschoolers first rely on gestural and prosodic
cues in understanding the knowledge states of others. These findings suggest that epistemic
multimodal cues play a precursory role in pragmatic development (see also Armstrong &
Hübscher, 2018; Esteve-Gibert & Prieto, 2018).
Emotional states
While infants have been shown to interpret emotion online from facial expression (see
section 1.2.1.1. above), the ability to label emotions develops later. It has been shown that by
two years of age, some children are able to match some names of some emotions and the
appropriate facial expression (e.g., Izard, 1971). Older children can recognize emotions such as
happiness, sadness, fear, anger and disgust in facial expression (e.g., Harrigan, 1984, among
many others). Moreover, although prosodic abilities related to emotions develop very early in
infancy (see section 1.2.1.1. above), surprisingly, children start to use their speech perceptual
skills to understand speaker’s affective state much later (Nelson & Russell, 2011; Quam &
Swingley, 2012). Nelson & Russell (2011) found that preschoolers seem to label emotion on
the basis of facial and postural cues and the ability to understand prosodic emotional cues takes
longer to develop. By the same token, Quam & Swingley (2012) showed that while 4- and 5-
year-old children consistently used happy or sad prosody to interpret a situation or an emotion,
2- and 3-year-olds exploited facial and body-language cues. Furthermore, when prosodic cues
compete with lexical cues, young children seem to rely on lexical ones, in contrast to adults
(e.g., Friend & Bryant, 2000; Morton & Trehub, 2001). As has been proposed by Fernald
(1989), children pay more attention to what is said rather than how it is said. In a similar fashion,
Friend (2001) suggested that a transition from affective to linguistic meaning in the
comprehension of prosody occurs, therefore while infants rely on prosodic cues, older children
rely more on lexical content. However, it should be noted that children are unlikely to confront
situations with discrepant cues.
In relation to prosody, younger children have been shown to implicitly use acoustic cues
to infer the emotional state of others. In a series of studies, Berman and colleagues (Berman,
Chambers, & Graham, 2010, 2016; Berman, Graham, Callaway, & Chambers, 2013; Berman,
Graham, & Chambers, 2013) explored the children’s ability to relate emotional prosody to
emotion by using both explicit (pointing responses) and implicit online (eye-tracking)
methodologies. When investigating children’s sensitivity to acoustic cues (happy-, sad- or
neutral-sounding prosody) to detect affect in a context of referential ambiguity (e.g., broken
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doll and intact doll), Berman et al. (2010) found that 4-year-olds’ pointing responses did not
show understanding of emotional prosody, but their gaze behavior did. Berman, Graham, &
Chambers (2013) reported that 5-year-old children succeeded in both explicit and implicit tasks.
Similarly, in Berman, Graham, Callaway, et al. (2013) 5-year-old children showed sensitivity
to acoustic cues bearing emotional meaning through both pointing and eye gaze, while 4-year-
olds resolved it only in their eye movements. The results of a more recent study (Berman et al.,
2016) showed that while only older children at the age of 5 can explicitly match acoustic and
visual cues, young children at the age 3 are able to do it implicitly in case of negative affect
(sad-sounding intonation and sad-looking face). These findings were echoed by Khu,
Chambers, & Graham (2018) who found that eye gaze measures of 4-year-old children indicate
that they use the interlocutor’s emotional prosody to infer the interlocutor’s emotional state.
Taken together, these studies indicate that children heavily rely on multimodal cues in
emotion recognition. While they exploit gestural cues very early on, the ability to link prosodic
cues to emotion starts to emerge in an implicit manner around age 3, and only later (around age
4 or 5) in a more explicit way. Finally, it is noteworthy to highlight that whereas a growing
body of studies focuses on recognition of emotions on the basis of facial expression and
prosodic cues, much less is known about how children use prosody to express their emotional
states.
Polite stances
It has been shown that listeners expect the speaker’s affect to be consistent with his or
her polite stance (Camras, Pristo, & Brown, 1985). However, research on children’s awareness
of politeness has primarily focused on the acquisition of grammatical constructions and lexical
cues and have neglected to address the issue from multimodal point of view. To our knowledge,
only a couple of studies have looked at the role of the prosodic cues in the understanding of
politeness in preschool-aged and school-aged children (Bates, 1976; Shochi, Erickson,
Sekiyama, Rilliard, & Aubergé, 2009). Bates (1976) reported that children first identify the use
of please (3-year-olds) as polite, then they can recognize the use of question intonation (4-year-
olds) as more polite, and later they perceive the conditional form as more polite (6-year-olds).
Yet, a recent study by Hübscher, Prieto, & Wagner (in press) has shown that 3-year-old children
can broadly rely on prosodic and visual cues in inferring politeness meaning. In this between-
subject study, 3-year-old children participated in a comprehension task and were asked to judge
the speaker’s polite stance. Across all conditions, the lexical cue to polite stance please was the
same and prosodic and facial features varied across conditions. The results of the experiment
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revealed that preschool children can make use of intonation and/or facial expression exclusively
to access speaker’s polite meaning. These findings contradict prior research on children’s use
of prosodic cues when inferring politeness stance (Bates, 1976), but at the same time are in line
with other studies showing that preschoolers use multimodal cues to infer emotional and
pragmatic meanings (see Armstrong & Hübscher, 2018 for a review).
The ability to recognize politeness meanings is an important step in children’s
sociopragmatic development and emerges relatively early. Another no less important ability to
communicate politeness appears to develop more slowly, that is children’s own evaluation of
the social pragmatic conditions in the discourse context that should trigger polite behavior. To
be appropriately polite, children must be able to evaluate the social relationship between the
speaker and the hearer by assessing in conversation factors such as social distance and power
among interlocutors, as well as the cost of the action (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Children are
generally taught to use appropriate polite forms by adults who provide them a model (Küntay,
Nakamura, & Ateş-Şen, 2014). But the process of acquisition of politeness signaling takes place
over the first five years of life. The developmental literature states that the ability to use target
polite forms is acquired around 5 years of age or older (e.g., Baroni & Axia, 1989). According
to Bates (1976), until 4 years children primarily use direct questions and imperatives to request
something, then, from 5 to 6, they can use proper syntactic forms, but only later, at around age
7, children are able to use appropriate to the content requesting form.
Along the same lines, previous work on children’s acquisition of register conditions in
politeness marking has mainly focused on the lexical (and also morphosyntactic) strategies to
signal politeness meanings, though there are a few exceptions. For example, a recent cross-
sectional study (Hübscher, 2018) sheds light on the children’s ability to use multimodal cues
(prosody, gesture, body posture) to express politeness and their role in development. A group
of 3- to 5-year-olds was prompted to request high-cost and low-cost objects in situations
embedded in high and low social distance conditions. The results showed that preschoolers use
a wide range of prosodic mitigation strategies (e.g., rising intonation, more breathiness, slower
speech rates), gestural mitigation strategies (e.g., eyebrow raises, smiles, adaptors) and body
signals (e.g., raised shoulders, trunk lateral leanings) to request a high cost object and/or asking
an interlocutor with higher social distance. Further, in contrast with 3-year-olds, the older
children showed a more extended use of indirect polite constructions which indicates that the
ability to exploit lexical and morphosyntactic markers to communicate politeness develops in
a more slow way during the preschool period.
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The studies reviewed in this subsection show that gesture and prosody continue to play
a precursory role in pragmatic development, specifically in the development of politeness,
beyond the infancy period.
Pragmatic inferences and irony
Inferring beyond the literal meaning of discourse has proved to be a difficult area for
young children’s pragmatic development. Children acquire gradual understanding of pragmatic
and nonliteral language and continue to improve it throughout childhood. For example, it has
been argued that preschoolers do not use contextual information to interpret utterances in the
same way that adults do (Snedeker & Trueswell, 2004). Given that, children’s ability to derive
scalar implicatures has been a lively area of research. In scalar implicatures, a weaker term of
a scale is used while a stronger alternative is excluded. An example would be the use of “some”
instead of “not all” in the sentence “some of the animals are sleeping” (example extracted from
Barner, Brooks, & Bale, 2011). Therefore, “some” implies “not all” (“not all the animals are
sleeping”) and the listener needs to generate an enriched meaning and conclude what the
speaker did not say but could have said. Research has shown that children younger than 5-and-
a-half years old fail to draw scalar implicatures at the same rate as adults (e.g., Barner et al.,
2011; Katsos & Bishop, 2011; Noveck, 2001, among others). However, some authors propose
that preschool children do indeed start to have the necessary pragmatic competence to derive
implicatures. They argue that difficulties can be explained by the lack of processing resources
(Pouscoulous, Noveck, Politzer, & Bastide, 2007) or vocabulary size (Barner et al., 2011).
Next to the aforementioned studies, getting a grasp on nonliteral meanings (humor,
irony) also requires the understanding of the intentions of others. Infants’ intention-reading
skills allow them to detect jokes at a very early stage. Children begin to appreciate humor as
young as 1 year and first stimuli that elicit infant’s laughter are nonverbal (auditory, tactile,
social, visual) (Sroufe & Wunsch, 1972; also see Hoicka & Wang, 2011 above). The study
conducted by Hoicka and Gattis (2008) demonstrated that 2- and 3-year-old children detect
jokes on the basis of laughter that may or may not accompany a joke action. Later in
development, children largely rely on visual and auditory cues in grasping humor. When humor
is verbal, children face difficulties in understanding certain type of jokes until 8 years (Shultz,
1974).
Shifting to irony, despite some divergences among findings, as a whole, it is agreed at
between 5 and 11 years children begin to understand speaker’s ironic intent (e.g., Demorest,
Meyer, Phelps, Gardner, & Winner, 1984; Filippova & Astington, 2010; Harris & Pexman,
2003). Recent studies have shown that audiovisual cues can facilitate children’s detection of
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irony (González-Fuente, 2017; Laval & Bert-Erboul, 2005). Laval & Bert-Erboul (2005)
showed that 5-year-old children build their interpretation of sarcastic utterances on intonation.
Furthermore, González-Fuente (2017) investigated the role that prosodic and gestural cues play
in children’s early understanding of verbal irony. Five-, eight- and eleven-year-old children
participated in a comprehension task which involved the detection of irony on the basis of
audiovisual cues to emotion: strongly mismatching, weakly mismatching and matching
prosodic and gestural cues. The results showed that strongly mismatching multimodal cues lead
to better irony understanding in 5-year-olds.
In sum, some complex pragmatic skills such as ability to derive scalar implicatures, grasp
humor and comprehend irony are not acquired until after the preschool years. These pragmatic
contexts require the appreciation of the speaker’s intent and assessment of multiple cognitive
and emotional cues which implies an inference process. Children master their inferring ability
as they grow over and this is related to their developing cognitive skills (see section 1.2.2.2. on
ToM and pragmatics below).
Discourse abilities: turn-taking and narrative development
In order to use language efficiently, children must learn the pragmatic conventions that
are acquired through social interactions (Carmiol & Sparks, 2014). The knowledge of
communication rules is a part of pragmatic competence and includes the understanding of the
timing of social exchanges. During the preschool years, children develop turn-taking skills
learning how to get into and maintain a conversation, make repairs and evaluate what is relevant
(Casillas, 2014). At around three and four years of age, children can regularly use conventional
fillers in conversation, and by age four, children are able to time turn-taking in an adult-like
way (Casillas, 2014). Interestingly, it has been speculated that children rely more on prosodic
cues to identify upcoming turn-end boundaries as compared to adults (Casillas & Frank, 2012).
By age five, children can anticipate and repair communication breakdowns (Casillas, 2014). By
age six, children master other conversational abilities such as breaking into ongoing
conversation (Ervin-Tripp, 1979). On the whole, children rapidly acquire turn-taking skills over
the first years of life.
However, other pragmatic aspects take more to develop. Even though the ability to string
sentences together to convey extended discourse such as narratives begins to emerge during the
preschool years (e.g., Applebee, 1980), this period is considered transitional as children take
their first steps in narrative development. The early narratives produced by 3- to 4-year-olds are
characterized by the lack of important features such as having a goal-based structure. Children
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do not produce ‘true narratives’ until the age of 5 or 6 (Applebee, 1978). Only at this age do
children start to use discourse markers. Syntactic complexity and thematic coherence of their
narratives increase, as well as the complexity of informational structure (Berman & Slobin,
1994; Diessel & Tomasello, 2005; McCabe & Peterson, 1991). Moreover, the narratives
become more adult-like in the prosodic domain (Kallay & Redford, 2016).
Research has shown that gesture plays an important role in narrative development. Thus,
several studies reported that gesture and speech continue to develop simultaneously (Colletta
et al., 2015; Graziano, 2014; Sekine & Kita, 2015). For example, Sekine & Kita (2015) analyzed
elicited narratives produced by 3-, 5- and 9-year-old children and found that gesture and speech
developed in parallel at the sentence and discourse levels. In this way, as narratives become
more complex, the gestures used by children also develop. In a similar vein, Graziano (2014)
indicated that the appearance of particular types of gestures (e.g., palm presentation gesture) is
tied to the developing ability to structure a narrative. Colletta et al. (2015) explored narrative
development in preschool-age (5-year-olds) and school-age (10-year-olds) children, and also
pointed out the co-development of speech and co-speech gestures. A longitudinal study by
Demir, Levine & Goldin-Meadow (2015) demonstrated that gesture use at the age of 5 predicts
later narrative structure in speech.
Furthermore, other studies suggest that gestures have a boosting role in narrative
development. Some studies have found such evidence with respect to discourse comprehension
(Clark, Hutcheson, & Buren, 1974; Goldin-Meadow & Wagner, 2005; Llanes-Coromina, Vilà-
Giménez, Kushch, Borràs-Comes, & Prieto, 2018; Macoun & Sweller, 2016; McNeil, Alibali,
& Evans, 2000; McNeill, 2000). For example, McNeil, Alibali, & Evans (2000) tested
preschooler’s speech comprehension, and established that when the spoken messages were
complex, reinforcing gestures gave external support for language comprehension since they
guide children’s attention toward the meaning of the message. Macoun & Sweller (2016)
reported benefits of iconic and deictic gesture in narrative comprehension. A more recent study
by Llanes-Coromina et al. (2018) found that beat gestures also help children to recall discourse
information and facilitate comprehension. In addition to fostering comprehension in children,
gestures can be used as a scaffold to produce more elaborate narrative discourse (Vilà-Giménez
& Prieto, 2018). For instance, in Vilà-Giménez & Prieto (2018), 5- to 6-year-old children were
shown to produce better narratives in terms of narrative structure and fluency after a training
session in which they were encouraged to perform beat gestures.
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To summarize, the work reviewed in this section shows that gesture, prosody, and
pragmatic abilities develop in a parallel way, and gesture alongside with prosody continue to
play a key precursory role in sociopragmatic development beyond the early infancy period.
Although traditionally the studies on pragmatics focused more on lexical and morphosyntactic
cues, recent research has highlighted the importance of multimodal resources. Thus, children
are found to be sensitive to multimodal markers when inferring particular pragmatic meanings
(see sections on nonliteral language, epistemic meanings and polite stances), even if at first they
do so implicitly (see section on emotional states). Although the comprehension of some
pragmatic meanings (e.g., focus) may lag behind, there is recent evidence for earlier sensitivity
to prosodic information in interpreting them (see section on focus and informational structure).
On the production side, preschoolers have already acquired basic intonational inventory of the
ambient language and move to acquire specific prosodic features to express complex pragmatic
meanings (e.g., information structure). At the same time preschoolers continue to refine their
speech motor control (see section on speech acts). Likewise, preschoolers are shown to use
different gestural and prosodic strategies to express complex pragmatic meanings (see sections
on epistemic meanings and polite stances). Finally, although the studies on narrative
development usually focus on older children (starting from the age of 5), the co-development
of speech and co-speech gestures has been indicated also for preschool period (see section on
narrative development).
All in all, while the large and growing body of research has studied the co-development
of the gesture, prosody and pragmatics at the earliest stages (Goldin-Meadow, 1998, 2014),
much less is known about the role played by gesture and prosody in children’s later linguistic
and sociopragmatic development. Gesture is often disregarded in research on children’s later
language development, particularly after the emergence of speech when children acquire
complex lexical and grammatical features of language. However, gesture indeed continues to
form an integral part of the language-learning process, as can be clearly seen from the
developmental evidence on narrative abilities. Along with prosody, both are continuously
developing in form and function throughout childhood. To date, studies on the mapping
between prosody and meaning are limited, specifically in the preschool period, with
intonational development being the main focus of research.
Though the studies reviewed in this section highlight that gesture, prosody and pragmatics
go hand-in-hand in later development and insinuate the role of prosody and gesture as scaffolds,
studies on preschool-age children’s use and comprehension of multimodal cues in their
pragmatic development remain sparse in comparison to the research on the multimodal
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foundations of language development in infants. Specifically, no research to date has assessed
the relationship between gestural and prosodic imitation abilities and pragmatic abilities in
preschool children (see proposed Study 2 below). Moreover, although specific aspects of
pragmatic development have been analyzed from multimodal perspective (see Hübscher, 2018),
no study has completely assessed children’s use of prosodic and gestural cues to express
sociopragmatic meanings (see proposed Study 3 below).
1.2.2. ToM development and its links with other cognitive and linguistic abilities
1.2.2.1. ToM development
Successful sociopragmatic development require children to obtain the understanding that
another person may have a different perspective and thus to be able to take others’ point of
view. The capacity to attribute mental states (e.g., beliefs, intentions, desires, knowledge) to
others has been widely studied in the developmental literature of what has been called Theory
of Mind (ToM) (a term coined by Premack & Woodruff, 1978; see also Perner (1991), Wellman
(2014) for a review). ToM, also known as ‘mind-reading’, ‘mentalizing’ or perspective-taking,
refers to a cognitive ability to impute one’s own or others’ mental states and to make predictions
about the behavior of other individuals (Premack & Woodruff, 1978, and many others).
Mental attributions could be verbal or non-verbal (Goldman, 2012). In verbal tasks,
children are required to make explicit judgments about others’ behavior. The child’s ability to
attribute false-belief mental states has been of particular interest. The so-called false-belief tests
(Wimmer & Perner, 1983) constitute the traditional way to measure verbal ToM in
developmental research. Let us take as an illustration the standard Sally and Anne paradigm
task (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985). In the Sally and Anne tasks, the child observes a
character (Sally) place an object in location A and leave. In the absence of the character, the
object is moved to a new location B by another character (Anne). The child is asked to predict
where Sally will first look for the object when she comes back. The child succeeds in the task
if she/he realizes that Sally will act according to her mistaken belief and therefore will first look
for the object where she left it before leaving (location A), rather than in its real place (location
B). Another standard explicit false-belief test widely used across studies is unexpected content
task such as the “Smarties task” (Astington & Gopnik, 1988; Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer,
1987) in which the child is shown a box of a well-known brand of candy, Smarties, and asked
what is inside to which she/he answers “Smarties”. Then the child opens the box and finds
pencils inside. Once the pencils are returned and the box is closed, the child is asked (a) what
was in the box, (b) what had she/he thought was in the box, and (c) what would her/his friend
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think is in the box. In order to succeed, the child must be able to reconstruct their own previous
false belief and the false belief of others.
The tasks described are examples of first-order false-belief task. These tasks assess a
child’s understanding that other individuals’ beliefs differ from each other and that one acts in
accordance with one’s own mistaken belief. While these tasks involve the understanding of
what an individual thinks about real events (first-order beliefs), second-order false-belief tasks
involve the understanding of what an individual thinks about other individual’s thoughts (Perner
& Wimmer, 1985). So, second-order tasks require recursive understanding of other people’s
belief about another’s belief such as “John thinks Mary thinks...”. The second-order belief tasks
are usually used to measure ToM in older children.
A large body of research has demonstrated that critical development of ToM occurs
during the preschool period showing a fairly consistent pattern in the child’s development of
ToM (Perner, 1991; Perner & Roessler, 2012; Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001; Wimmer &
Perner, 1983). Thus, children younger than 4 years of age are more likely to fail on false belief
tasks. Later on in the preschool years (e.g., between 4 and 5 years of age) children become able
to ascribe false beliefs and anticipate the behavior of others.
Yet, a growing number of studies have argued that ToM abilities emerge much earlier,
even beginning at the first year of life (see for an overview Baillargeon, Scott, & Bian, 2016;
Baillargeon, Scott, & He, 2010; Scott & Baillargeon, 2017). These investigations provided
evidence that false belief understanding is presented already in infants and toddlers. In order to
explore early mind-reading abilities, usually nonverbal implicit tasks are used, which are less
cognitively demanding and more suitable for testing very young children. In contrast to
traditionally used verbal tests, nonverbal tasks do not require an explicit judgment by the child.
Thus these studies often use eye-tracking techniques to demonstrate that infants can correctly
reason about different false-belief scenarios and make predictions. For example, infant’s
looking time is measured in violation-of-expectation tasks showing that children look longer
when agents act inconsistently with their false beliefs (e.g., Kovács, Téglás, & Endress, 2010;
Oniski & Baillargeon, 2005; Yott & Poulin-Dubois, 2012). Another measure is that of
anticipatory looking, which shows that young children anticipate that an agent holding a false
belief will look for a desired object in the erroneous location (e.g., He, Bolz, & Baillargeon,
2012; Sodian et al., 2016; Surian & Geraci, 2012). Some studies with slightly older children
use the measure of preferential looking while children are listening to a false belief story and at
the same time looking at a picture book with matching and non-matching pictures (Scott, He,
Baillargeon, & Cummins, 2012). Another type of spontaneous behavioral response is that of
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anticipatory pointing, which is produced by the infant to inform an agent who mistakenly looks
for the target about its real location (Knudsen & Liszkowski, 2012a, 2012b). In other words,
children expect an agent to commit a mistake and spontaneously intervene by pointing the true
location. Another paradigm applied in the research on precocious ToM capacities is the use of
elicited-intervention tasks in which the measures of child’s spontaneous helping behavior to a
false belief story character are used (Buttelmann, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009; Buttelmann,
Suhrke, & Buttelmann, 2015; Southgate, Chevallier, & Csibra, 2010). Nonverbal tasks also
vary in the false belief scenarios they use (e.g., false belief about location, presence, identity,
etc.) and in their linguistic demand: the tasks used with infants are generally nonverbal, while
the tasks with toddlers may have a linguistic component.
Nonetheless, while verbal false belief results can be easily replicated, a recent study on
nonverbal ToM has shown no convergent validity of false belief processing between different
types of tasks (Dörrenberg, Rakoczy, & Liszkowski, 2018). In this study, four implicit ToM
measures were analyzed including looking times, anticipatory looking, pupil dilation and
spontaneous communicative interaction. The results indicated no robust evidence for both
replicability and convergent validity of these tasks suggesting that the empirical foundation of
implicit ToM is still insufficient to ultimately prove it. Further, some doubts have been raised
as to whether the spontaneous looking and elicited interventions can be taken as strict evidence
of the ToM capacities (Heyes & Frith, 2014; Heyes, 2014). For instance, Heyes (2014) has
argued that these early behaviors can be attributed to perceptual novelty and other low-level
processes such as imaginal novelty, delay‐related memory limitations, or retroactive
interference; thus, doubt could be casted on the existence of implicit ToM ability in infants.
1.2.2.2. The links between ToM and language
Success on the explicit false belief tasks has been shown to be related to language
development. Research in both typically developing and atypical populations has extensively
investigated the nature of the relationship between children’s linguistic abilities and developing
ToM and has revealed clear links between the two (e.g., Astington & Jenkins, 1999; de Villiers
& de Villiers, 2000; de Villiers, 2005; Happé, 1995; Milligan et al., 2007; Tager-Flusberg &
Joseph, 2005). Significant positive correlations were found between ToM and general language
ability (e.g., Astington & Jenkins, 1999; Jenkins & Astington, 1996), semantics (e.g., Astington
& Baird, 2005b) and syntax (e.g., de Villiers & Pyers, 2002; Slade & Ruffman, 2005).
The direction of the correlation between false belief and language has been widely
debated (Astington & Baird, 2005; Astington & Jenkins, 1999; Milligan et al., 2007; Slade &
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Ruffman, 2005). Many researchers argue that language ability is a predictor of false belief and
thus language plays a causal role in the developing of false belief understanding (Astington &
Baird, 2005). The empirical arguments for this position come from both longitudinal studies
(Astington & Jenkins, 1999; de Villiers & Pyers, 2002) and training studies (to be described in
section 1.2.2.4. below). The results reported in Slade & Ruffman (2005) confirm that linguistic
ability contributes to later ToM. However, they defend that the direction from language to false
belief (and not vice-versa) might be due to statistical reasons. As they pointed out, language
measures often include a wider range of scores compared to those assessing false belief abilities,
which leads the language score to predict false believe performance. The authors further state
that the relation between language and ToM is bidirectional since there is some evidence that
mental state understanding promotes semantic development (Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2001).
Further, Milligan et al. (2007) conducted a quantitative meta-analysis of 104 studies on
the relation between language ability and false-belief understanding in children under age 7.
The meta-analysis showed that in longitudinal studies, earlier language ability scores predicted
later false belief performance, and vice-versa, earlier false belief performance predicted later
language skills. Thus, these findings support the view of Slade & Ruffman (2005) that the
relation between language and ToM is bidirectional. However, when comparing effect sizes,
significant differences between them were found, suggesting significantly stronger effect from
language ability to false-belief performance than the opposite. Although Milligan et al. (2007)
combines results from a substantial amount of work, several limitations of this study need to be
considered. First, only studies conducted in English were analyzed. Second, the analysis was
restricted to general language ability, as well as semantic and syntactic measures, leaving
behind the pragmatic aspect of the language. The alleged reason for excluding pragmatics was
that the pragmatic ability is often assessed by conversational measures (i.e., child’s use of
language is dependent on an interlocutor) while in this study, only standardized language tests
and experimental language tasks were taken into account.
Numerous studies have looked at determining which specific language components
promote ToM. More specifically, previous research has argued that syntactic abilities are
particularly important for ToM (e.g., Astington & Jenkins, 1999; de Villiers, 1995, 2000; de
Villiers & de Villiers, 2000; de Villiers & Pyers, 2002; Smith, Apperly, & White, 2003).
Specifically, de Villiers (1995, 2000), de Villiers & de Villiers (2000) have argued that syntactic
development – in particular the acquisition of sentential complements – promotes false belief
understanding since it provides children with a necessary representational format for reasoning
false beliefs. In sentential complements, the clause that may be false can be embedded in the
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main clause that may be true. Importantly, the truth-value of the embedded clause does not
depend on the entire sentence. Therefore, the very structure of complement clauses allows to
handle misrepresentation and serves as a bootstrap for false belief understanding. This
assumption was tested in a longitudinal study (de Villiers & Pyers, 2002). Indeed, the results
showed that the mastery of the sentential complements (namely, production of and memory for
complements) is a precursor of false belief understanding, and, as claimed by the authors, a
possible prerequisite for success in false belief. Interestingly, the meta-analysis conducted by
Milligan et al. (2007) revealed that the largest effect sizes were obtained between false belief
performance and the memory for complements test (de Villiers & Pyers, 2002). The role of
other types of clausal sentences in the development of false belief is less clear. However,
relative clause sentences, which require the handling of meta-representation, were also found
to correlate with false belief performance in 4-year-old children (Smith et al., 2003; although
see Hale & Tager-Flusberg, 2003 below).
Unlike the abovementioned studies that highlight the role of syntax, others have argued
about the importance of semantics (e.g., Moore et al., 1990; Olson, 1988; Ruffman, 2000;
Ruffman et al., 2003). For example, Olson (1988) emphasized the role of metacognitive terms
used to refer to mental states (see section 1.2.2.4. below). Similarly, Moore et al., (1990)
showed that false belief performance was related to children's understanding of the modal
expression of speaker certainty and uncertainty. Ruffman (2000) suggested that false belief is
related to general language ability which includes syntax and semantics as they provide children
with the needed terminology for reasoning about mental states. Ruffman et al. (2003) argued
that it is difficult to make a clear distinction between syntax and semantic measures since
semantic abilities are required to understand syntactic tests. In a correlational study with 3- and
5-year-old children, Ruffman et al. (2003) tried to isolate the potential effects of syntax and
semantics by administering a series of specific language measures. The results showed that
semantics but not syntax predicted unique variance in false belief understanding and that the
composite score of syntax and semantics accounted for more variance than syntax alone.
Nevertheless, the authors suggested that one language ability is a clue for another, as well as
the opposite, and argued that ToM is rather related to general language ability in general.
Albeit considerable attention has been devoted to investigate the nature of the relation
between language and ToM and the role played by different linguistic abilities in the
development of the latter, less is known about the relationship between ToM and children's
pragmatic abilities. The relationship between the two stems from the fact that pragmatic
interpretation requires attribute intentions to the speakers and implies reasoning about their
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mental states (Sperber & Wilson, 2002). As a result, some scholars even suggest that pragmatics
and ToM are equivalent (see the ‘pragmatic theory of mind’ recently proposed by Frank, 2018).
Some other theoretical works defend a pragmatic account of ToM which in part relies on the
Gricean theory of pragmatics such as communicative intentions and implicatures (Grice,
1975). For example, Sperber & Wilson (2002) regard pragmatics as a sub-module of ToM.
However, several authors have suggested distinguishing between different types of pragmatic
inferences depending upon whether or not they include a ToM component. For instance,
recently, Andrés-Roqueta & Katsos (2017) proposed a distinction between “linguistic-
pragmatics” and “social-pragmatics”. While “linguistic-pragmatics” refers to the context that
being understood only requires structural language and pragmatic knowledge, “social-
pragmatics” also involves ToM competence. Though pragmatics and ToM are conceptually
related and both seem to require inferences, it is important to highlight that no one can be
reduced to the other (Bosco et al., 2018). Bosco et al. (2018) discussed in detail the overlap
between pragmatic ability and ToM and make the case that, as a faculty, pragmatics is distinct
from ToM and despite the close relation between them they are still separable constructs. The
current PhD thesis will adopt this latter view.
The developmental relation between ToM and pragmatics is still open to debate (e.g.,
Westra & Carruthers, 2017). Empirical studies that investigated how ToM is related to
pragmatics have mostly focused on certain pragmatic aspects of nonliteral language. More
precisely, a large part of work has concentrated on irony comprehension (e.g., Filippova &
Astington, 2008; Happé, 1993), as well as on understanding of metaphor (e.g., Lecce, Ronchi,
Del Sette, Bischetti, & Bambini, 2018) and jokes (e.g., Leekam, 1991). Several studies have
suggested that second-order beliefs in particular are correlated with the children’s
understanding of irony (Hancock, Dunham, & Purdy, 2000; Nilsen, Glenwright, & Huyder,
2011; Winner & Leekam, 1991). However, in a recent study by Bosco & Gabbatore (2017) no
effect of second-order ToM was found. Additionally, Angeleri & Airenti (2014) showed that,
even though irony understanding correlates with ToM, there is no direct relation between them
given that this correlation is due to the shared effect of language on both ToM and irony
comprehension. Further, children’s capacity to distinguish between jokes and lies has been
found to be correlated with their ToM competence. Leekam (1991) tested children’s
comprehension of intentional falsehood and jokes and found that children who were able to
distinguish between jokes and lies also understood speaker’s second-order belief. Concerning
metaphors, it has been suggested that first-order ToM is necessary for metaphor comprehension
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(Happé, 1993). Hence metaphorical abilities and their link with ToM are usually tested in older
children (middle childhood).
As claimed by some authors, some studies aimed at investigating the relationship between
pragmatics and ToM have faced some methodological confusion related to the specific tasks
used to assess both abilities. Bosco et al. (2018) and Frank (2018) indicated that a set of previous
studies administered pragmatic tasks in order to assess ToM abilities such as the widely used
Strange Stories test (Happé, 1994). This test consists of stories comprising Pretence, Joke, Lie,
White Lie, Misunderstanding, Persuasion, Appearance/Reality, Figure of Speech, Irony,
Double Bluff, Contrary Emotions, and Forgetting. As Bosco et al. (2018) noted,
Misunderstanding, Persuasion, Figure of Speech and Irony may be considered to be pragmatic
tasks. Bosco et al. (2018) thus argue that using tasks that involve both pragmatic and ToM
competence is a methodological confusion and that these two abilities should be assessed with
distinct tests. The same holds for other tests developed to assess ToM (e.g., Champagne-Lavau
& Charest, 2015).
The relationship between prosodic and gestural abilities, on the one hand, and ToM, on
the other, has been investigated much more sparsely compared to the research on ToM and
other linguistic abilities. Some studies have recently pointed out the importance of prosodic,
and more importantly, visual cues in children’s comprehension of mental state concepts and its
relationship to ToM abilities (Armstrong, 2014; Armstrong et al., 2018). For example,
Armstrong (2014) found that 4- to 6-year-old children can use prosodic information when it is
the only cue available. In this study, children participated in a disbelief comprehension task in
which mental states were encoded trough intonation. Children of all tested ages were able to
perceive intonationally-encoded disbelief, though 6-year-olds were significantly more accurate.
Interestingly, while doing the task, some 6-year-old tended to produce facial gestures
corresponding to the perceived stimuli (e.g., movement of head backwards for incredulity). This
finding suggests that at this age there is an association between the three components: the
intonational pattern, the meaning and the facial gestures. Another study by Armstrong et al.
(2018) examined the comprehension of disbelief in Central Catalan in 3- to 5-year-old children
with a similar task but the information was presented in three conditions: audio, visual and its
combination. Results showed very poor performance of 3-year-old children when there was no
visual information. There was a great variability in the performance of the 4- year-olds but 5-
year-olds showed close to ceiling accuracy. The author suggested that younger children depend
on visual scaffolding to understand disbelief, by around 4 years children still continue to rely
on visual cues but move towards the acquisition of linguistic meaning, and by around 5 years
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they have already acquired the linguistic meaning and do not need visual cues anymore.
Interestingly, the children also were administered a Sally and Anne task, and it was found that
the children who succeeded in the false belief task were those who were the most successful in
the comprehension task.
Yet, apart from Armstrong et al. (2018), to the author’s knowledge, no study has
investigated the correlation between ToM abilities and prosodic and gestural abilities. We
hypothesize that the two skills will be positively correlated. This state of affairs is partly due to
the fact that the situation with assessment tools of prosodic abilities differs from that of
standardized vocabulary and grammar tests. If one reviews the set of currently available
prosodic assessment tools and protocols in children, namely Prosody Profile (PROP) (Crystal,
1992), Prosody Voice Screening Profile (PVSP) (Shriberg, Kwiatkowski, Rasmussen, Lof, &
Miller, 1990), Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy 2 (DANVA 2) (Nowicki & Duke,
1994), Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C) (Peppé & McCann,
2003), Perception of Prosody Assessment Tool (PPAT) (Klieve, 1998), and Minnesota Tests of
Affective Processing (MNTAP) (Lai, Hughes, & Shapiro, 1991), it quickly becomes apparent
that they are not optimal to comprehensively assess pragmatic prosodic skills in young typically
developing children (see Table 1 for a comparison of features).
First, all six tests primarily focus on children with atypical language development. While
the PROP and the PVSP were designed exclusively for clinical use and the PPAT and the
MNTAP were used for research purposes in diverse clinical populations, the DANVA 2 and
the PEPS-C (which were initially developed for both clinical and research purposes) have been
used to assess clinical groups as well as typically developing children.
Second, most of the prosodic tests focus only on receptive abilities. While the PROP and
the PVSP do evaluate expressive prosody in terms of its acoustic dimensions such as pitch,
tempo, stress, loudness, laryngeal quality and resonance, neither of these tests covers pragmatic
prosody in a comprehensive way. Perhaps the PEPS-C is the only one of these instruments that
takes into account the pragmatic function of prosody. Yet it only assesses a few communicative
aspects of prosody, namely, the ability to place contrastive stress and express affective stances
(only two, liking and disliking), as well as the production of neutral questions and statements.
Importantly, most of the tests were designed for children aged 5 or older, and only two of
them are appropriate for children aged 3 or 4 (the PVSP and DANVA 2). Finally, the
administration of most of these tests is fairly time consuming (the DANVA 2, PEPS-C and
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PPAT take around one hour, and the MNTAP takes more than two hours) making it difficult to
apply them to young children.
To summarize, while prosodic assessment tests for children do exist, (a) they are primarily
designed for clinical use or for research in diverse clinical populations; (b) they focus
principally either on receptive prosodic skills, or on very basic expressive prosodic skills and
do not fully integrate the pragmatic functions of prosody; (c) they are not designed to assess
preschool-aged children; and (d) they are time-consuming.
Test Purpose Target child
population
Prosodic skills assessed
Target
age
range
Administration
time
Clinical
use
Research
use
Typical
Atypical
Expressive
Receptive
PROP + - - + + - – –
PVSP + - - + + - 3-81 –
DANVA 2 + + + + - + 3-99 1 hour
PEPS-C + + + + + + 5-14 1 hour
PPAT - + - + - + 7-12 1 hour
MNTAP - + - + - + 6-11 2-3 hours
TABLE 1: Comparative table showing the main features of the existing prosodic assessment tools for children
All in all, no standard prosodic test to date is optimized to assess in a comprehensive way
young children’s expressive prosodic abilities in relation to pragmatic contextual situations.
There is thus a need for a standard elicitation test which allows researchers to understand the
acquisition of pragmatic prosody during the preschool years. While some research has been
done on the early development of intonation (for a review see Frota & Butler, 2018), our
understanding of how intonation is acquired in the preschool years and beyond is still patchy.
The first aim of Study 3 is to create a tool to comprehensively assess young children’s
expressive prosodic and gestural abilities in relation to pragmatic contextual situations. This
tool will be used in Study 1 which has the goal of assessing the relationship between a variety
of linguistic skills – with special attention paid to pragmatic and prosodic skills – and ToM
abilities.
All in all, this section has shown that while a large body of research has focused on
determining the direction and nature of the relationship between ToM and such language
abilities as syntax and semantics, much remains to be investigated with respect to the role of
pragmatic and multimodal abilities.
1.2.2.3. The links between ToM and emotion understanding
Besides the link between linguistic abilities (semantics, syntax, pragmatics) and ToM,
there also has been a focus on exploring how ToM is related to other developmental domains.
One area that has received particular interest is the link between ToM and emotion
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understanding. Emotion understanding refers to children’s knowledge of the nature of
emotions, as well as knowledge of what causes them and how they can be regulated (Pons,
Harris, & de Rosnay, 2004). Prior research has demonstrated that affective perspective taking
develops gradually beginning in the preschool years (Wellman, Phillips, & Rodriguez, 2000)
and that this is related to the growing understanding of beliefs and desires (Bartsch & Wellman,
1995). Both emotion understanding and ToM are crucial for social interaction and they are
conceptually connected (Dunn, 1995). Indeed, more recently, a body of empirical studies found
positive correlations between these two capacities in preschoolers and primary school children
(e.g., 3- to 5-year-olds (Harwood & Farrar, 2006); 4- to 6-year-olds (Ornaghi, Pepe, &
Grazzani, 2016) 4-and-a-half- to 6-and-a-half-year-olds (Weimer, Sallquist, & Bolnick, 2012);
5- to 7-year-olds (Bender, Pons, Harris, & de Rosnay, 2011); 3- to 8-year-olds (Grazzani,
Ornaghi, Conte, Pepe, & Caprin, 2018). Further, another study by (Kuhnert, Begeer, Fink, &
de Rosnay, 2017) with a longitudinal design reported a positive association between the
performance on emotion understanding by 5-year-old children and their later ToM abilities (7
years of age).
Further, performance on emotion tasks is also found to correlate with language tests
(Grazzani et al., 2018; Ruffman et al., 2003; Strand, Downs, & Barbosa-Leiker, 2016). For
example, contrary to some predictions by Astington & Jenkins (1999), Ruffman et al. (2003)
found a relation between syntax (understanding of word order and embedded clauses) and
emotion understanding performance in 3- to 5-year-old children. As noted by the authors, there
was no reason to expect this relation since, in contrast to false belief, emotion understanding
does not require meta-representational capacity. However, a recent longitudinal study by Strand
et al. (2016) confirms that there is an association between emotion understanding and linguistic
abilities. In this study, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary (PPVT), a measure of receptive
vocabulary, was administered. It was found that the performance on this task and on the emotion
expression recognition test are related in older preschoolers (49 to 67 months), but not in
younger (36 to 48 months). The authors suggested that initially emotion recognition skills are
insular but with the development of verbal abilities over the course of the preschool years they
become more influential. To put it another way, according to Strand et al. (2016), the nature of
the association between emotion-related processes and linguistic abilities changes over time:
whereas in the early stages this association is weak, later it becomes stronger and bidirectional
as both verbal skills and emotion understanding influence each other. Another study by
Grazzani et al. (2018) also found that language ability (PPVT) was significantly correlated with
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both emotion understanding and ToM, and played a crucial role in mediating the relationship
between these two abilities and in explaining variance in ToM.
1.2.2.4. Training studies to promote ToM
Some studies have used a training methodology to pinpoint the kinds of linguistic
interaction that facilitate the development of ToM (Hale & Tager-Flusberg, 2003; Lohmann &
Tomasello, 2003; Lohmann, Tomasello, & Meyer, 2005). To this end, Lohmann & Tomasello
(2003) assigned 3-year-old children who failed a false belief test to four training conditions
involving adult–child interactions. In a first control training condition (no language training),
children were provided with a series of deceptive objects such as writing pen that resembled a
flower but not with accompanying linguistic commentary. In a second condition (discourse only
training), the children were shown the same training objects but the experimenter engaged the
children in perspective-shifting discourse using language but not mental state verbs nor
sentential complement constructions. In a third condition (sentential complement training only),
the deceptive aspect of the training objects was not highlighted but when talking about the
objects, the experimenter used mental state verbs and sentential complement constructions
which had been previously associated with false-belief understanding (see de Villiers, 2005).
The fourth condition (full training) included all mentioned factors: perspective-shifting
discourse (the second condition), and mental state verbs and sentential complements (the third
condition). The results showed that (a) deceptive experience alone is not sufficient; (b) both the
second and the third conditions facilitated children’s false belief understanding; (c) children
showed the largest improvement in the full training condition. It thus seems that language plays
a key role in the development of children’s false belief understanding (both discourse-shifting
and sentential complement syntax), and linguistic experience is facilitating and necessary
condition for the improvement of ToM. Another training study (Hale & Tager-Flusberg, 2003)
reported similar findings. In order to determine which structures play a causal role in the
development of ToM, Hale & Tager-Flusberg (2003) trained children on sentential
complements and on relative clauses (as a control condition). While the control group showed
no improvement in posttests, the group trained on sentential complements increased their
performance on false belief understanding. Moreover, training children in sentential
constructions has the same effect on false belief understanding as false belief training. The
outlined studies support the view of the de Villiers (2005) that sentential complements influence
false-belief understanding. However, the findings from Lohmann & Tomasello (2003) indicate
that syntax is not of sole importance for ToM development.
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Meanwhile, other studies suggest that conversational interactions are fundamental for the
development of ToM and examine the beneficial effects of training with such interactions on
promoting of ToM (Appleton & Reddy, 1996; Janet Wilde Astington & Peskin, 2004; Guajardo
& Watson, 2002; Ornaghi, Brockmeier, & Grazzani, 2011; Slaughter & Gopnik, 1996). These
studies highlight the role of discourse and support the idea that that children’s acquisition of
ToM depends on exposure to conversations, as they provide insights into the beliefs and desires
of others (e.g., Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Harris, 2005; Siegal, 1999; Tomasello, Striano, &
Rochat, 1999). As pointed out by Ornaghi, Brockmeier, & Grazzani (2011), “the relationship
between language and theory of mind is well embedded in one particular kind of language:
mental state talk” (p. 240). Mental state terms (also called inner state terms, metacognitive
language and mental lexicon) refer to mental states of belief, thoughts, intention, desire and
emotion. In the literature, the term “mental state” frequently refers exclusively to cognitive
terms (think, know) in contrast to desire (want, need) and emotional state terms (delighted,
angry). However, sometimes this term also references emotional states (e.g., LaBounty,
Wellman, Olson, Lagattuta, & Liu, 2008; Lemche, Kreppner, Joraschky, & Klann-Delius,
2007). Some researchers advocate for a more flexible use of the term. For example, Astington
& Peskin (2004) propose “mental terms” for all mental state terms and “metacognitive terms”
for belief states. This thesis will use “internal states” to describe both emotional and belief states
in, following the proposal by Armstrong & Hübscher (2018).
Children’s use of mental state terms such as know, think and believe is found to correlate
with their ToM understanding (e.g., Brown, Donelan-McCall, & Dunn, 1996; Dunn, Brown, &
Beardsall, 1991). Moreover, previous research has shown that mental state talk input facilitates
later understanding of mental state concepts in toddlers (e.g., Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2006,
2008). For example, Taumoepeau & Ruffman (2006) found a longitudinal relation between
mother mental state language to 1-year-old children and children’s desire language and emotion
understanding at the age of 2. In a follow-up study, Taumoepeau & Ruffman (2008) expanded
their findings and reported that at 24 months of age, mothers’ talk about thoughts and
knowledge predicts children’s later mental state language at 33 months. The relation between
parental use of mental state language and later ToM was also found in preschool-age children
(LaBounty et al., 2008; Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002).
While the abovementioned studies showed that a child’s developing ToM is influenced
by parents’ conversational interaction, other studies used a training method to explore the role
of a child’s exposure to mental state language (Appleton & Reddy, 1996; Astington & Peskin,
2004; Guajardo & Watson, 2002; Ornaghi et al., 2011; Slaughter & Gopnik, 1996). The first
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training studies (Appleton & Reddy, 1996; Slaughter & Gopnik, 1996) with 3-year‐old children
demonstrated that false belief understanding can be trained in focused conversations. These
studies used a task-specific approach, that is, the training was developed to teach children to
pass standard ToM tests and generally consisted in providing children with feedback according
to their performance on specific false-belief sequences. Examples include false belief about the
location of an object (Appleton & Reddy, 1996) or appearance-reality distinction (Slaughter &
Gopnik, 1996). More recent studies, however, involve an experimenter reading stories. For
example, Guajardo & Watson (2002) examined experimentally whether children’s mental state
input can facilitate ToM understanding. They found that 3- to 4-year-old children who
participated in training sessions (reading a children’s storybook and the subsequent discussion
of the mental state concepts) showed improved performance on false belief and deception tests
compared to children who did not participate in any training sessions. In a training study by
Astington & Peskin (2004), 4-year-old children were exposed to mental state language in story
texts. The same stories were read to children in the experimental and control conditions but
while for the training group the story was especially rich in metacognitive terms, for the control
group all metacognitive terms were removed though mentalistic concepts remained an integral
part of the stories. The children listened to the stories at home and at school during a 4-week
intervention period. The results of the posttests showed that children in the experimental group
produced significantly more metacognitive verbs in a storytelling task. Somewhat
unexpectedly, the training group did not improve their performance on the metacognitive
comprehension task; yet both groups showed improvement on the false belief explanation task,
the control group even significantly more than the experimental one. The authors suggested that
exposure to this kind of story, even if mentalistic concepts are represented implicitly, facilitates
ToM understanding. Hence children do not only passively perceive mentalistic concepts but
actively construct their own interpretations and thus acquire understanding of mentalistic
concepts.
In a more recent cross-sectional study, Ornaghi et al. (2011) explored the role of actively
using mental state lexical items in promoting ToM development and gaining advanced
understanding of mental state terms. Two age groups (3- and 4-year-old children) participated
in a 2-month intervention which involved a storyteller reading stories enriched with mental
terms. While in the control condition children were engaged in language games and
conversations, the experimental condition children were encouraged to use mental state terms.
There were no linguistic activities in the control condition. The findings can be summarised as
follows: (a) the training intervention had a significant effect on the metacognitive language
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comprehension performance of both the younger (3-year-olds) and the older group (4-year-
olds); (b) a positive effect on the emotion understanding was found only in the younger
children; (c) a positive effect on the false belief understanding was found only in the older
group. Importantly, the pragmatic competence of the preschoolers was also assessed. In order
to do so, 12 stimuli from the Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (Carrow-
Woolfolk, 1999), a test which evaluates the use of pragmatic language, was administered.
Although the intervention effect was not found for the pragmatic test, there was a significant
difference between pretest and posttest for pragmatic competence in the 3-year-old-children
experimental group and in both the 4-year-old-children experimental and control groups.
The training studies reviewed in this section have shown the beneficial effect of
conversational interventions on children’s cognitive development. However, little is known
about whether perceiving and enacting multimodal expressions of internal states and emotions
can contribute to enhancing perspective taking skills. The aim of Study 4 of this thesis will be
to analyze the effect of an embodied intervention based on (Ornaghi et al., 2011) on both
preschooler’s pragmatic competence and ToM.
2. GOALS OF THE DISSERTATION
The current PhD thesis has four main goals. The first goal is to examine the link between
the sociopragmatic skills of preschool children to their linguistic and ToM development. This
will enable us to have a clearer picture of the complex relationship between (a) sociopragmatic
abilities and (b) ToM skills, as well as (c) language skills and (d) emotion-detection abilities,
and will also contribute to the discussion about the overlap between these capacities. The
second goal is to explore the relationship between sociopragmatic abilities and ToM skills, on
the one hand, and multimodal imitation abilities on the other. Multimodal imitation ability is
understood as the ability to jointly imitate prosody, gesture and lexical content. The third goal
is to determine developmental trajectories of prosodic and gestural patterns that encode
sociopragmatic meanings in the preschool years. This will help assess how preschoolers master
their prosodic and gestural abilities and the role that prosody and gesture play in sociopragmatic
development. Finally, the fourth goal is to assess the role of enactment training with voice and
body on perspective-taking in children's sociopragmatic development.
All in all, the present PhD thesis aims to explore sociopragmatic development in
preschoolers and their links with language and ToM abilities and determining the role that
gesture and prosody play in this development.
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To achieve the abovementioned goals, four empirical studies will be carried out. The
following research questions will be addressed in each study: (Study 1) Are sociopragmatic
abilities in children correlated with ToM and language skills (semantics, syntax, narrative
ability) in 3- to 4-year-old preschool children? (Study 2) Are sociopragmatic abilities in
children tied to multimodal imitation abilities (understood as the ability to jointly imitate
prosody, gesture and lexical content) in 3- to 4-year-olds? (Study 3) What are the
developmental trajectories of prosody and gesture in the expression of sociopragmatic
meanings in 3- to 4-year old and 5- to 6-year old children? (Study 4) Does an enactment training
intervention involving prosody and gesture have a beneficial effect in improving
sociopragmatic competence and ToM in 3- to 4-year-old preschoolers?
Our general hypotheses for each of the studies are the following: (1) Study 1:
Sociopragmatic competence in preschoolers will be positively correlated with ToM abilities, as
well as with other language skills and emotion detection skills; (2) Study 2: Children’s
sociopragmatic competence and ToM abilities will be linked to multimodal (gesture and
prosody) imitation abilities; (3) Study 3: Prosodic and gestural cues go hand-in-hand in
development and serve as precursors in the encoding of sociopragmatic meanings; and (4)
Study 4: “Embodied simulation” of children’s own and other’s mental and emotional states
will significantly affect ToM understanding and those linguistic capacities that require
perspective-taking skills such as sociopragmatic abilities.
3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
3.1. The usage-based theory of language acquisition
This PhD thesis will follow a usage-based approach to language acquisition (see
Tomasello, 2000, 2003, 2009 for a review). Broadly, as the name indicates, this approach holds
that language is learned through language use. Drawing from extensive work on early
acquisition, this theory focuses on two sets of cognitive skills that one year-old children are
equipped with, namely being: intention-reading (functional dimension) and pattern-finding
(grammatical dimension) (Tomasello, 2003). Intention-reading includes the ability to share
attention with others, the ability to follow the attention and gestures of others, the ability to
direct the attention of other people to distal objects by using gestures (pointing, showing etc.),
and the ability to learn the actions of others by imitation (see also section 1.2.1.1.). These
preverbal abilities are indispensable for the acquisition of language, including the acquisition
of complex linguistic constructions. The other set of skills refer to pattern-finding, which is a
summary term for such processes as analogy, categorization and distributional analysis
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(Tomasello, 2009). These abilities also start to emerge very early in infancy, some
prelinguistically. Importantly, both intention-reading and pattern-finding skills are domain-
general, in other words, they are not only applied in the linguistic domain (Tomasello, 2003).
Crucially, intention-reading also enables various cultural skills and practices, and pattern-
finding also allows for the categorization of various aspects of the world. While intention-
reading is the central construct in the socialpragmatic approach to language acquisition
(Carpenter & Tomasello, 2000), pattern-finding is the central assumption in the usage-based
approach to the acquisition of grammar.
The unique ability of intention-reading is crucial for Tomasello’s account. It allows the
child to understand what is intended with a speech act. In the comprehension of speech acts,
children largely rely on multimodal cues, and children express their communicative act trough
vocalization and gesture. As part of intentionality, gestural communication and pointing in
particular constitute a pillar of the usage-based approach. This thesis adopts this view and is
aimed at exploring later stages of development, when children become able to express more
specific and sophisticated intentions.
As noted in Tomasello (2009), the usage-based approach may be summarized as follows:
(1) meaning is use; (2) structure emerges from use. While the former involves a functional (or
semantic) dimension of communication, the latter involves a structural (or grammatical)
dimension. The usage-based theory suggests that the understanding of the nature of the
language and language acquisition can be gained only by looking to the process of
communication. The pragmatics of human communication is primary, and first communicative
interactions, as well as later conversations pave the way for language development. Although
language can be used in communication in a variety of ways, one common trait of language is
that it is acquired by understanding how other people use and interact with it.
All in all, the basic claim of the usage-based approach to language acquisition is
essentially that language structure emerges from language use and “universals of linguistic
structure derive from the fact that people everywhere have the same set of general cognitive
processes” (Tomasello, 2009, p. 85).
As a final remark, we wish to point out that, although for this PhD thesis the usage-based
approach will be followed, there are other possible explanations of the human linguistic
capacity. Within modern linguistic theories, a main contrasting approach to the language
acquisition is ‘nativist’ view which suggests that children are born with innate linguistic
knowledge rather than they acquire language through the social interaction experience (for a
review, see Cowie, 2017).
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3.2. Embodied cognition
The theories of Grounded Cognition (Barsalou, 2008; for a review see Barsalou, 2010)
and of Embodied Cognition (Foglia & Wilson, 2013; Ionescu & Vasc, 2014; see Wilson &
Foglia, 2017 for a summary) hold that cognitive processes are highly dependent on sensory-
motor experience. Although the central tenet of both approaches states that the mind and body
influence each other, the former relates cognition to the environment, modal simulations and
bodily states, rejecting traditional views that knowledge is separate from brain’s modal systems
for perception, action and introspection.
Accounts of Grounded Cognition advocate that cognition is grounded in multiple ways,
including bodily states and, especially, simulations (or reenactment). For example, Tucker &
Ellis (1998) showed the perception of the handle of a cup activates a grasping simulation, in
this way, all multimodal experiences associated with the object become active. Much research,
particularly neuroimaging research, has confirmed the key role played by simulation in
cognitive processes (see Barsalou, 2008 for a review), providing evidence that the areas that
represent motor and perception properties of objects are activated when conceptual knowledge
about objects is represented. It has been shown that the simulation is ubiquitous in cognition,
including perception (e.g., perception of space), perception-action coordination (the example
described above), memory (e.g., memory effects), knowledge and conceptual processing (e.g.,
numerical cognition, language comprehension, and language learning). For example,
Pulvermüller, Hauk, Nikulin, & Ilmoniemi (2005) demonstrated a link between action and
language system in lexical processing. They found that when participants read the words for an
action (e.g., kick, pick), the motor system become active, action verbs thus produce simulation
in the corresponding areas of motor system. Their results suggest that language and motor
systems interact during the processing of lexical information. Similarly, Myung, Blumstein, &
Sedivy, (2006) demonstrated a priming effect of motor simulations on word recognition.
Specifically, they found that participants were faster to make a lexical decision for words that
were primed by a word with shared manipulation features (e.g., piano and typewriter) in
contrast to a word that was not related to the target word in terms of manipulation features (e.g.,
piano and blanket). This indicates that sensorimotor information is relevant to lexical semantics.
Furthermore, speakers retrieve words better if they produce gestures related to the meaning
(e.g., Krauss, 1998). Research on development also has shown that gesture can convey meaning
that cannot yet be expressed verbally (Goldin-Meadow, 2003). The abovementioned research
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and many other studies (for a review see Barsalou, 2008) have demonstrated the importance of
simulation in language comprehension.
Similarly, Embodied Cognition theory claims that sensory-motor processes, our body’s
morphology, and internal states impact human cognition (Ionescu & Vasc, 2014). The
Embodiment Thesis claims that “many features of cognition are embodied in that they are
deeply dependent upon characteristics of the physical body of an agent, such that the agent's
beyond-the-brain body plays a significant causal role, or a physically constitutive role, in that
agent's cognitive processing.” (Wilson et al., 2017). Therefore, Grounded Cognition may be
regarded as an attempt to explain embodied cognition by the concept of grounding (Wilson et
al., 2017), i.e., human cognition is grounded in sensory-motor experiences, while the
Embodiment Thesis is more wide and consists in three assumptions: (1) body is a constraint on
cognition; (2) body is a distributor for cognitive processing; (3) body is a regulator of cognitive
activity. This implies that body does not merely transduce perception information to cognition,
but is its integral part.
Likewise, Embodied Cognition theory suggests that perception and action systems are
engaged to perform cognitive functions during language comprehension and language learning.
A bulk of neuroscience studies within the embodied cognition framework has provided
evidence for activation in brain areas that bear a systematic relation to the language content
during language comprehension (e.g., Tettamanti et al., 2005; for a review, see Glenberg, 2007).
For example, Tettamanti et al. (2005) found that listening to action-related sentences activates
the areas of the brain associated with perception and visual motion. Behavioral data has also
provided strong evidence for the Embodiment Thesis in various levels of language processing
(grammatical, semantical). For example, concerning the relationship between language and
action, it has been demonstrated that there is a strong link between concept knowledge and
situated action (Borghi, Glenberg, & Kaschak, 2004).
Another set of studies have focused on language learning. For example, Kiefer & Trumpp
(2012) showed that embodiment can facilitate reading and writing. Further, Maouene,
Sethuraman, Laakso, & Maouene (2011) provided evidence that embodiment can influence
children’s acquisition of verbs since bodily experiences can facilitates verb meaning
acquisition. For a review of developmental research on the role of gestures in language learning
see section 1.2.1.; see also Goldin-Meadow (2018) for a review.
Thus following these theories, cognition and the body are intimately related to each other,
bodily states activate cognitive processes, and the use of embodiment can promote language
comprehension and learning. All four studies of this thesis rely on this fundamental paradigm
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but Study 4 directly tests the effect of an embodied intervention on cognitive (ToM) and
language abilities in preschool children. We hypothesize that the embodied training
intervention will specifically impact sociopragmatic ability since sociopragmatic learning is
embodied. It has been clearly shown for the early stages of communicative development since
children acquire language through situated experiences (Tomasello, 2009). For intention
reading, bodily states (gestures, facial expressions, eye gaze) are key components. As noted by
Bergen (2015), the usage-based approach proposed by Tomasello (2009) is the most complete
account to language acquisition from an embodied perspective.
4. HYPOTHESES
Based on the review of the literature discussed in the previous sections, we outline the list
of hypotheses to be tested in this PhD thesis. As explained earlier, the main underlying
hypothesis of this thesis is that sociopragmatic competence is a crucial component in children's
linguistic development which is related to mind-reading abilities and also to embodied language
(e.g., prosodic and gestural abilities) expressed through the body and the voice.
4.1. Study 1
Considerable attention has been drawn to investigate the link between ToM and language.
Syntactic and semantic abilities have become a special focus of interest (e.g., Astington &
Jenkins, 1999; de Villiers & de Villiers, 2000; de Villiers & Pyers, 2002; Milligan et al., 2007;
Slade & Ruffman, 2005; see section 1.2.2.2. for more detail). However, fewer studies have
dealt with pragmatic abilities, with the exception of studies which have primarily focused on
specific issues such as irony comprehension. Moreover, the relationship between
sociopragmatic abilities and ToM needs to be further investigated, given that (a) some scholars
suggest an overlap between these two capacities; and (b) some studies investigating the
relationship between pragmatics and ToM have faced a methodological confusion (for a review,
see Bosco et al., 2018). Following Bosco et al. (2018), the current PhD thesis will adopt the
view that as a language faculty, pragmatics is distinct from ToM and despite the close relation
between them they still are separable constructs.
The aim of Study 1 will be to examine the relationship between sociopragmatic abilities
in 3- to 4-year-old children and their mind-reading abilities (ToM) by applying a new
specifically designed Audiovisual Pragmatic Test (see proposed Study 3). Our hypothesis is
that these abilities will be positively correlated. This study will add to the literature by being
the first to directly investigate the correlation between general sociopragmatic competence and
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ToM with 3- and 4-year-old children, and prosodic abilities and ToM. Moreover, the correlation
with the ability to detect emotions will be assessed. Furthermore, children's sociopragmatic and
ToM capacities will be investigated in regard to other language skills (semantics, syntax,
narrative abilities). We hypothesize positive correlations between them.
4.2. Study 2
Imitation is a complex skill that relies on different social, cognitive and motor abilities,
and plays a pivotal role in early language development. First, imitation is crucial for children’s
early language development, as it not only supports word learning but also serves as a
scaffolding mechanism for acquiring specific language features and grammatical structures (for
a review see Carpenter, 2014). Moreover, imitation has been shown to play a key role in social
communicative development (Carpenter, 2014). Numerous empirical and longitudinal studies
have examined various aspects of imitation and the mechanisms that underlie it and shown
imitative behaviors to be a naturally occurring interaction (Lieven & Stoll, 2013) throughout
infancy and early childhood (Carpenter, Nagell, et al., 1998; Carpenter, Tomasello, & Striano,
2005; Masur & Eichorst, 2002). For example, Carpenter & Tomasello, reported a relationship
between imitation and the early development of visual and oral aspects of language (Carpenter,
Nagell, et al., 1998; Carpenter et al., 2005). They found imitative learning to be predictive of
referential language, as well as of communicative gesture, in this case declarative pointing.
They also showed that the ability to imitate in role-reversal tasks correlated with the
comprehension and production of pronouns. In role- reversal tasks, a child observes an adult
performing an action directed at the child and then is asked to reverse roles by directing the
same action at the adult (in simple imitation tasks, both adult and child direct their actions at
the same external object, such as a ball). Likewise, in Masur & Eichorst (2002), infants’ early
spontaneous imitation of novel words was shown to be predictive of larger vocabularies later
in development. Research has pointed to the relevance of prosody imitation in prosodic
development since it requires both prosodic perception and production. Thus, imitation has been
shown to scaffold the production of prosodic contours (Gratier, 2014). Evidence from clinical
research confirms that, for example, Peppe, Cleland, Gibbon, O’Hare, & Castilla (2011) noted
that a difficulty in imitating prosody might be an obstruction for learning prosody. Thus, there
is evidence that imitation is linked to multimodal language abilities in particular and social
communication skills in general. Nevertheless, little is known about the association between
imitation abilities in children and their sociopragmatic skills.
Study 2 will analyze how multimodal language imitation abilities—understood as the
ability to jointly imitate prosody, gesture and lexical content—are related to sociopragmatic
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competence and ToM abilities in preschool-aged children. This age group (from 3 to 4 years
old) is of particular interest given the evidence suggesting that developmental changes in the
fidelity of imitation are experienced during this period. Prior to age 3, though infants tend to
copy adult’ actions such as clapping, their performance is characterized by goal neglect and it
is therefore more accurate to label this behavior mimicry rather than imitation (Jones, 2007). In
contrast, older children show an understanding of the goal or intention of a specific action and
their imitative behavior is thus focused on outcomes. In fact, there is research showing a clear
progression from mimicry to imitation. For example, Dickerson, Gerhardstein, Zack & Barr
(2013) found that children between 1.5- and 2-years of age merely mimicked gestures, while
2.5- to 3.5-year-olds imitated them. The older children were also able to copy models more
closely, thus showing a greater degree of fidelity in their imitative behavior. The question of
imitative fidelity across ages even into adulthood was investigated in McGuigan, Makinson &
Whiten (2011), which concluded that “people may become more imitative as they mature”
(p. 1).
In line with previous findings, it is believed that both sociopragmatic competence and
ToM abilities will be positively correlated with imitation abilities.
This study will be carried out in collaboration with Dr. Iris Hübscher (URPP Language
and Space, University of Zurich, Switzerland) and Eva Castillo (an MA student in the
Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra).
4.3. Study 3
Research in the last few decades has shown that the prosodic features of language are
crucial in signaling sociopragmatic meanings in communication, such as speech act marking,
focus, or epistemic stance marking. In the developmental literature it has been shown that the
acquisition by children of increasingly complex prosodic skills goes hand-in-hand with their
sociopragmatic development (see Prieto & Esteve-Gibert, 2018, for a review). However,
relatively little is known about the developmental path followed by prosodic features in later
stages of development (Armstrong & Hübscher, 2018; Chen, 2018; Hübscher, 2018; Ito, 2018).
While tests that measure prosodic skills in children do exist at present, as yet there exists
no test that assesses children’s expressive prosodic skills within a variety of pragmatically
relevant discourse contexts (see section 1.2.2.2. for more details). Study 3 is an attempt to help
fill this gap. It has two main goals. The first is to present a new Audiovisual Pragmatic Test
(henceforth APT) designed for use with typically developing children starting from the age of
three. The APT uses a carefully controlled picture-supported set of Discourse Completion Task
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(DCT) items which allow the user to assess prosody in relation to pragmatic social contexts.
The second is to explain the findings from an administration of this test to 3- to 4-year-old and
5- to 6-year-old Catalan-speaking children. Moreover, Study 3 will also investigate gestures
used by children while performing the test.
This study will add to the literature regarding intonational and gestural development of
preschoolers. Our general hypotheses are the following: (a) DCT elicitation methodology,
which has been successfully used for assessing adult intonational grammar, can be also
applicable to obtain expressive developmental data for 3- to 6-year-old children; (b) Prosodic
and gestural cues go hand-in-hand in development and serve as precursors in the encoding of
sociopragmatic meanings.
4.4. Study 4
Study 4 will investigate whether perceiving and enacting multimodal expressions of
mental states and emotions can contribute to enhancing perspective taking skills. This study is
carried out in collaboration with Dr. Judith Holler (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,
the Netherlands & Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University,
the Netherlands) and Dr. Iris Hübscher (URPP Language and Space, University of Zurich,
Switzerland).
Previous training studies have shown the beneficial effect of having language
conversations containing internal state terms on children’s cognitive development (e.g.,
Guajardo & Watson, 2002; Lohmann & Tomasello, 2003; Ornaghi et al., 2011). However, the
effect of embodied intervention has not been tested yet. We expect that children who reenact
multimodal language will show significant improvement. Further, it is believed that the training
aimed at promoting ToM and mental verb comprehension (the methodology and training
materials were adapted from the training study by Ornaghi et al. (2011)) will affect not only
ToM understanding, but also those linguistic capacities that require perspective-taking skills
such as sociopragmatic abilities.
The goal of Study 4 is to carry out a one-month between-subject intervention training
experiment with a subsequent comparison of pretest and posttest scores related to ToM and
mental state comprehension, as well as to emotional and sociopragmatic skills. Further, one
more objective of this study is to develop an educational website in order to provide preschool
educators with experimentally tested tools that can be used in classroom.
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5. EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES
The following section will describe each of the studies in detail, covering the research
questions, methodology, and expected results for each study. All of the studies described have
already been partially carried out. As the data from Study 2 and 3 have been preliminary
analyzed, the corresponding sections will also include the summary of interim results.
5.1. Study 1: Sociopragmatic competence in preschoolers and its link with
other abilities
5.1.1 Research question
This study will explore the relationship between sociopragmatic competence in
preschool-age children and their ToM and emotion understanding, as well as linguistic abilities
(semantics, syntax, narrative abilities). Previous findings suggest a correlation between ToM
and semantic and syntactic abilities (e.g., Astington & Jenkins, 1999; de Villiers & de Villiers,
2000; de Villiers & Pyers, 2002; Milligan et al., 2007; Slade & Ruffman, 2005). The main aim
of Study 1 is to determine whether ToM also correlates with pragmatic abilities.
5.1.2. Participants
A total of 102 3- to- 4-year-old native Catalan-speaking children (45 male and 57 female;
mean age = 44.92 months, SD = 3.28 months; age range 39 to 51 months) participated in the
study. All participants were preschoolers at two Catalan public schools, located in the middle-
income district of Sant Martí within the metropolitan area of Barcelona, where the population
is largely Catalan-Spanish bilingual (96,3% understand Catalan, 73,6% speak Catalan) 1. The
main language of instruction in the target schools is Catalan (as opposed to Spanish). Prior to
the experiment, the children’s parents signed a participation consent form and completed an
occupational status questionnaire (mean ISEI score = 60.97, SD = 12.7 (Ganzeboom, De Graaf,
Treiman, & De Leeuw, 1992)), confirming middle class SES scores) as well as a language
questionnaire regarding the daily exposure of their child to Catalan (mean overall exposure time
= 56.8%, SD = 22.7). Data from a total of fifteen children had to be excluded from subsequent
analysis due to the fact that their mean exposure to Catalan was less than 20%. All children
were typically developing children and had no history of speech, language, or hearing
difficulties.
1 http://www.bcn.cat/estadistica/catala/dades/anuari/cap06/C0617010.htm
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5.1.3. Materials
Screening Measure
A screening test was applied to all children (117) in order to exclude participants with a
lack of Catalan language proficiency from the experiment. The screening measure was the ELI,
L'avaluació del llenguatge infantil (Saborit Mallol, Julian Marza, & Navarro Lizandra, 2005),
an expressive one-word vocabulary test specially designed to measure vocabulary size of
Catalan speaking children aged 0 to 6 years old. It assesses lexical knowledge with a picture-
naming task. The stimuli consisted of 30 pictures of common objects such as a tree, a bulb, or
a coat. The participant was given credit for every correctly named item, and the total score
(from 0 to 30) was normalized to a 0–100 scale. A minimum grade of 20% was established for
participation in the study. Fifteen children were not included in the study due to not meeting
this threshold. None of the participants included in the study showed difficulties in speaking
Catalan or understanding instructions, which were given in Catalan.
Main Measures
Emotion Understanding
To assess children’s emotion knowledge, the Catalan adaptation of the Emotion Matching
Task originally designed for English-speaking preschool-aged children by (Izard, Haskins,
Schultz, Trentacosta, & King, 2003) was applied. This task measures the emotion
comprehension of 2- to 6-year-olds and focuses on the four basic emotions: happiness, sadness,
anger and fear/surprise. Only the two most discriminative parts of the Catalan EMT were
administered: expression-situation matching and expression labeling.
Mental verb comprehension
Children’s comprehension of metacognitive verbs was assessed with the Catalan version
of the Metacognitive Vocabulary Test (Astington & Pelletier, 1998) designed for 3- to 7-year-
old children. The test consists of a total of 12 short stories accompanied by images. Only the
first six stories were used due to the young age of the participants.
Theory of Mind
Children’s false-belief understanding was assessed with the two classical and most widely
used explicit false-belief tasks. The first one was the classical Sally and Anne task (Baron-
Cohen et al., 1985); an adapted version for Catalan was used (Armstrong et al., 2018). The
second false belief measure was the false-belief unexpected content “Smarties task” (Gopnik &
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Astington, 1988). Both tasks were used in order to consider the ToM measure as a continuous
variable.
Pragmatics and Prosody
The APT is a test designed to assess pragmatic abilities in typically developing Catalan-
speaking children (Pronina, Hübscher, Vilà-Giménez, & Prieto, submitted). The general design
and elicitation procedure of the APT is based on a variety of currently used pragmatic tests for
children, e.g., the Test of Pragmatic Language (TOPL-2) (Phelps-Terasaki & Phelps-Gunn,
2007); the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–5 (CELF-5) instrument (Wiig,
Semel, & Secord, 2013); and the Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language–2 (CASL–
2) tool (Carrow-Woolfolk, 2017). The elicitation procedure was based on the DCT method, in
which an everyday social context is described to which the participant is asked to respond as
naturally as possible.
A total of 47 items were designed for the APT tool that represented some context that
might plausibly occur in everyday life. All 47 items were accompanied by illustrations which
were specifically designed for the APT (see Figure 1 for an example).
FIGURE 1: Item number 22 of the APT showing text and illustration intended to elicit an expression of concern
for a friend.
For the purposes of the study, given that the test takers would be 3- to 4-year-old children,
only the first 35 items of the test were applied (see Appendix A). These 35 items can be
classified into five areas according to the pragmatic functions they are intended to elicit, namely
basic interaction skills (6 items), speech-act marking (6 items), affective stance marking (13
items), focus marking (3 items) and marking of epistemic bias (7 items). The items were
presented in a fixed order based on increasing pragmatic complexity and difficulty, with the
first eleven items of the test presumably non-challenging for 3-year-olds since they mostly
evaluate basic interaction skills.
“Your friend just tripped
and fell down. What would
you say?”.
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Expressive vocabulary
The results from the ELI screening measure (i.e., the expressive one-word vocabulary
test, Saborit Mallol et al., 2005) were used to compute an expressive vocabulary score for each
child.
Expressive syntax
The expressive syntax test was designed to measure the oral expression of syntax in
Catalan-speaking children. The coverage of the test is based on previous sentence expression
tests developed for children such as the Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language-2
(CASL-2) (Carrow-Woolfolk, 2017).
Narrative competence
A Catalan adaptation of the Renfrew Bus Story test (Renfrew, 1997) was used to assess
children’s narrative skills. This test measures children’s ability to retell a continuous series of
events about a bus that escaped from its driver.
5.1.4. Procedure
The children were individually tested in a quiet classroom at the participating preschools.
All testing was performed in Catalan with each child by the author and three trained research
assistants. The tests were administered in a fixed order. The tests were divided into two blocks
in order make the assessment session shorter and facilitate children’s participation. The
Emotion Understanding, Narrative task, Mental verb comprehension and the Theory of Mind
tests were assessed in the first block, while expressive vocabulary, expressive syntax and the
APT were administered in the second. Each individual block lasted approximately 20-30
minutes and there were two sessions. For comparison purposes all test scores were normalized
to a 0–100 scale.
Emotion Understanding
The first part of the test (expression-situation matching) assesses emotion situation
knowledge. The child was shown four pictures of children expressing diverse emotions or
exhibiting a ‘neutral’ face and then was asked to indicate which one matches a described
situation, for instance, “Show me who has just been pushed away from the table”. The second
part (expression labeling) assesses expressive emotion knowledge; after being shown a picture,
the child was required to identify the emotion and say how the child in the picture feels.
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Following standard procedure, children were awarded one point for each correct answer in the
first part of the test and were awarded one or two points, depending upon accuracy in labeling,
for each correct answer in the second part. The total scores range from 0 to 36.
Mental verb comprehension
The child was read a short illustrated story and then was asked to select which of two
offered metacognitive verbs correctly describes the main character’s state of mind, for example,
“Does John know it’s raining or does John remember it’s raining?”. Two additional training
items were administered before the test starts. One point was awarded for each correct verb
choice. The total scores range from 0 to 6.
Theory of Mind
The first false belief task was presented in video format and enacted by puppets (see
Figure 2). The child was asked a control question (“Where will the girl look for the ball?”) and
a ‘false belief’ test question (“Where is the ball, really?”). Each correct response received 1
point.
FIGURE 2: Set of pictures from false belief task.
In the second false belief task, instead of the Smarties container, the participant was
shown a Lacasitos tube, which is familiar to Catalan children. Then, three questions were asked
in a fixed order: a self-test question (“What did you think was in the box before you opened
it?”), an other-person-test question (“What would your friend think was inside the box before
it was opened?”) and the open-ended question (“Why will he/she think that?”). A score of 1
was given for each correct answer to the former two questions (self-test and other-person-test
questions). A composite ToM score ranging from 0 to 4 was calculated (a possible maximum
of 2 for the location-change task and a possible maximum of 2 for the unexpected content task).
Pragmatics
The children were tested individually in a quiet room at their respective preschools by the
examiner. The child faced the computer screen where the images for each item were presented.
At the beginning of the test, two additional familiarization trials were carried out. For each item,
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in a lively fashion appropriate for speaking to a preschooler, the examiner described the social
situation represented in each item while the child looked at the illustration displayed on the
computer screen. The examiner then asked the child to respond appropriately as if he or she
was a character in the situation. It is anticipated that when the APT is given to very young
children, if the test taker seems to have difficulty understanding a situation or does not behave
as expected, the examiner should try contextualizing the situation by converting people who
are likely to be important to the child (such as a friend, parent or teacher) into the protagonist
of the situation. This technique was applied as needed during the administration of the tool.
Each child participant was exposed to 35 of the test items. Total duration of the full
procedure was between 15 and 20 minutes.
The scoring of each response was carried out online by the examiner at two levels, namely
at the levels of pragmatics and enactment.
The pragmatic appropriateness of responses was given a score from 0 to 2. While a score
of 0 was recorded when the child’s verbal response was either pragmatically inappropriate (for
example, saying “It wasn’t me” in response to the prompt shown in Figure 1), or completely
absent. A score of 1 was recorded if the child responded with a single word or a simple
construction that was nonetheless pragmatically appropriate to the situation (e.g., saying “Are
you okay?” in response to the prompt shown in Figure 1). Finally, if the answer was
pragmatically appropriate and a more complex set of constructions was used (e.g., saying “Are
you alright? Do you want me to go to the doctor with you?” in response to the prompt shown
in Figure 1), a score of 2 was recorded. The scores were then added, for a total ranging between
0 and 70 for pragmatic appropriateness (35 items × 2 points per item).
Enactment was only scored if the child’s verbal response to an item was pragmatically
appropriate, that is, if their pragmatic appropriateness score for that item was 1 or 2, not 0. If
the response was pragmatically appropriate in terms of utterance content, the examiner then
considered whether the enactment of the situation took place or not and recorded a score of 1
or 0, respectively. Thus, the response was scored as 1 if the child answered with the prosody
and gesture that would be appropriate if the situation was really happening at that moment and
used directed speech in first-person (e.g., to the question “What should you say?” the child
answered “Don’t cry!”). The response was given zero points if the child did not enact the
scenario, that is, if he or she did not take the perspective of the situation’s protagonist character
and used indirect speech (e.g., to the question “What should you say?” the child answered “That
he shouldn’t cry”). Also the enactment score was 0 if the response was pragmatically incorrect.
These scores were then added for a total ranging between 0 and 35 for enactment.
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Expressive syntax
Expressive syntax was assessed with 16 test items accompanied by pictures and implying
the use of various syntactic structures. The child was presented with a picture on a computer
screen and asked a question about the depicted scene that elicits specific grammatical
constructions. The child must respond with one or more sentences. For example, the beginning
of a sentence was presented and the child had to complete it (e.g., Aquest nen està dret. Aquest
nen... [està assegut] (“This boy is standing. This boy... [is sitting]”). Prior to the beginning of
the test, 2 familiarization items were given. The task was stopped after 5 consecutive incorrect
responses. The child was awarded one point for each correct answer, the total scores range from
0 to 16.
Narrative competence
The child was told a story about a bus while looking at pictures on a computer screen
which depicts the scenes of the story. Then she/he was asked to retell it. The task was
discontinued either when the child either indicated that she/he had finished or when there was
a pause in speech for 10-15 seconds and she/he did not comment when asked whether she/he
wanted to add anything else. The narratives produced by children were coded in terms of
fluency (coding system adapted from Vilà-Giménez & Prieto, 2018) and narrative structure
(coding system adapted from Vilà-Giménez, Igualada, & Prieto, 2018). Thus, each child was
given a fluency score, ranging from 7 (minimum) to 1 (maximum), and narrative structure
score, ranging from 0 (minimum) to 6 (maximum).
5.1.5. Expected results
We expect that results on the APT test will positively correlate with ToM performance,
proving the relation between mind-reading capacities and pragmatics. We also expect a
correlation between sociopragmatic competence and emotion understanding. Finally, we
hypothesize that pragmatic ability will correlate with other linguistic abilities, namely,
expressive vocabulary, expressive syntax and narrative ability.
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5.2. Study 2: A correlational examination of the link between children’s
imitation skills and their sociopragmatic abilities
5.2.1. Research question
This study will explore the relationship between imitation abilities, on the one hand, and
sociopragmatic competence and ToM abilities, on the other. Previous findings suggest strong
correlations between the ability to imitate and different language skills (vocabulary, particular
grammatical structures) (see section 4.2.). This study will determine whether or not the same
is true for sociopragmatic abilities. Moreover, this study will also investigate whether ToM
abilities correlate with imitation abilities.
5.2.2. Participants
The children for Study 2 were recruited at the same school as for Study 1 (see section
5.1.2. for the information about the schools). A total of 38 typically developing native Catalan-
speaking children (see section 5.1.3. for more detail about language screening measure) (20
male and 18 female, M age = 45.89 months, SD = 3.3 months; range 41–52 months) of middle-
class background from the Barcelona area participated in the experiment.
5.2.3. Materials
Gesture and prosody imitation task
In order to assess the children’s ability to imitate gesture and prosody, a special task was
created based on the Reciprocal Imitation Training (RIT) technique, which has been used in
several studies to improve the social communication skills of children and teenagers with
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) (e.g., Ingersoll, 2008, 2012; Ingersoll & Lalonde, 2010). The
RIT is a naturalistic behavioral intervention designed to teach spontaneous imitation to young
children with ASD by means of play interactions with a partner.
The basic materials for the gesture and prosody imitation task used here were created on
the basis of examples coming from the RIT. A set of twelve video-recordings were joined
together to form a sequence of conversational prompts about or directed at a teddy bear called
Esmolet. The twelve videos each showed a Catalan-speaking actor addressing either the teddy
bear or the camera and producing an utterance in child-directed speech style. The twelve
utterances consisted of exclamatives (expressing affective intonational meanings and
greetings), questions (yes-no and wh-questions) or imperatives, mostly either directed at or
referring to the bear, and each accompanied by appropriate intonation and gestures. Examples
may be seen in Table 2. Gestures were either conventional, iconic or metaphoric.
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Example
and gesture type
Gesture/ Utterance Example
and gesture type
Gesture/ Utterance
Conventional
Waving hand
Hola Esmolet!
‘Hello, Esmolet!’
Metaphoric
Open up palms and then
bring them together
Esmolet, abans d’anar a
dormir llegirem un llibre!
‘Esmolet, before going to
sleep we’ll read a book!’
Conventional
Finger to lips
Shhh, que l’Esmolet està
dormint
‘Shhh, Esmolet is sleeping!’
Metaphoric
Hands pressed together by
face, as if sleeping
Esmolet, ara anem a dormir!
‘Esmolet, let’s go to sleep!’
Conventional
Hands covering the eyes
Quina por que fa aquest
llangardaix!
‘This lizard is so scary!’
Iconic
Quick downward movement
with the right hand
Esmolet, anem al parc a
baixar pel tobogan?
‘Esmolet, shall we go to the
playground and slide down
the slide?’
TABLE 2: Examples of the video-recording prompts included in the gesture and prosody imitation task.
Audiovisual Pragmatic Test
In this study, the same Audiovisual Pragmatic Test was applied (see section 5.1.3 for
more details).
5.2.4. Set up and procedure
The two tests were carried out in a quiet room at the participating preschools and all the
sessions were videotaped. The children were assessed individually by the author and two
additional research assistants.
First, each child took the APT. The procedure was the same as described in section 5.1.4.
above.
Next, the child proceeded to the gesture and prosody imitation task. This involved first
watching a brief video with instructions and an introduction to Esmolet the teddy bear, which
was given to the child right before the first familiarization trial. The video playback was then
paused while the experimenter repeated the instructions in person, and this was followed by a
familiarization trial to make sure the child understood that they were supposed to imitate what
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they saw modeled in each video clip. The actual imitation task was then begun, with the child
viewing a continuous sequence of twelve videos as described above, each video separated from
the next by a 7-second pause. After the child watched two repetitions of the same clip, the
experimenter paused the video, imitated the gestures, prosody and lexical content as in the
video, and then encouraged the child to do the same by saying “Ara tu!” (‘Now it’s your turn!’).
It was decided to have the adult intervene in this manner because, as has been noted previously
by several authors (e.g., Dickerson, Gerhardstein, Zack, & Barr, 2013; Flynn & Whiten, 2008;
Nielsen, Simcock, & Jenkins, 2008), children perform poorer on gestural imitation tasks when
actions are presented only in video format, a phenomenon that can be explained by the lack of
social contingency inherent in a video. Finally, the child proceeded to imitate the behaviors
depicted in the video clip, using Esmolet the bear him/herself in accordance with the model
when appropriate. Figure 3 shows still images of children performing the imitation task.
FIGURE 3: Still images from two children performing the imitation task.
5.2.5. Coding
Gesture and Prosody Imitation Task
As noted, in this task, the child was encouraged to imitate three separate elements, verbal
content, prosody and gesture. Since it was conceivable that the child would fail to reproduce
one or more of these elements, the three were evaluated separately. Thus, for each of the twelve
videos, a separate score from 0-2 was given for gesture, prosody and lexical content imitation
yielding a possible maximum of 6 points. A score of 0 points was given if the child either failed
to imitate the component altogether or did something completely at variance from the model.
A score of 1 was given if the child reproduced the modeled gesture, prosody or lexical content
only partially. For gesture or prosody, this meant that the gesture or prosody produced by the
child was similar but not identical to the model. In the case of lexical content, this meant that
the child produced only part of the target utterance. Finally, a score of 2 points was given when
the child accurately reproduced the gesture, prosody or lexical content exactly as displayed in
the video. The twelve scores obtained for each component were summed to yield gesture,
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prosody lexical content imitation scores for each child, and then these three component scores
were summed to produce an overall imitation score per child.
Audiovisual Pragmatic Test
The coding system was the same as that described in section 5.1.4. In this study, only the
pragmatic abilities score was considered.
5.2.6. Summary of results
In order to examine the strength and direction of association between the pragmatic
abilities scores and the four imitation scores (prosody, gesture, lexical content, and general
imitation), four Pearson bivariate correlation analyses were performed. Table 3 shows the
results. In all cases, imitation and pragmatic skills scores were moderately and positively
correlated, with correlation coefficients ranging from .57 to .69, all of them highly significant,
at p < .001.
Imitation scores
Correlation with
pragmatic skills
scores
R p
Gesture imitation .570 .000
Prosody imitation .616 .000
Lexical content imitation .639 .000
Overall imitation score .694 .000
TABLE 3: Correlation scores (R correlation coefficients and p values) obtained between imitation and
pragmatic skills scores.
Regarding the first research question, the results revealed that children’s ability to imitate
gestures, prosody and lexical content positively correlate with their sociopragmatic
competence. The current study has thus extended the findings from previous studies which
showed strong correlations between the ability to imitate and different language skills
(vocabulary, particular grammatical structures), and has demonstrated a strong positive
association between imitating and pragmatic ability.
From a practical point of view, the findings of this study also have implications for the
development of interventions aimed at supporting and improving sociocommunicative skills in
children, normally developing or otherwise. Given the correlation shown here, it may well be
that active imitation training will lead to enhanced pragmatic skills. Future experimental
research involving training paradigms might be able to answer this question.
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Further analysis will address the second research question about the link between
children’s imitation abilities and ToM abilities.
5.3. Study 3: Developmental trajectories of prosody and gesture in their
expression of sociopragmatic meanings: a cross-sectional study
5.3.1 Research question
This study has the goal of exploring children's joint prosodic and gestural developmental
trajectories to express sociopragmatic meanings. A tool that has been created to assess
pragmatic abilities in preschoolers, will be also used to comprehensively assess young
children’s expressive prosodic and gestural abilities in relation to pragmatic contextual
situations. This cross-sectional study with two separate groups of children (one group of 3- to
4-year-old children on the one hand and another group of 5- to 6-year-old children on the other)
has two main goals. First, to test whether DCT elicitation methodology, which has been
successfully used for assessing adult intonational grammar, can be also applicable to obtain
expressive developmental data for 3- to 6-year-old children. The second goal is to explore the
prosodic and gestural cues encoding sociopragmatic meanings in these two groups of preschool
children (3- to 4-year-olds and 5- to 6-year-olds).
5.3.2. Participants
This cross-sectional study will involve 3- to 4-year-old children on the one hand and 5-
to 6-year-old children on the other. Data collection is being carried out in two phases. First, 3-
to 4-year-old children from the Barcelona area of Catalonia were already administered the
pragmatic and prosodic test. The 102 native Catalan-speaking children from Study 1 also took
part in Study 3. In the future, the same pragmatic and prosodic test will be administered to one
hundred 5- to 6-year-old children.
5.3.3. Materials and procedure
In order to explore how preschool-age children express sociopragmatic meanings through
intonation and/or gesture, the APT was applied. The stimuli, procedure and coding system of
the APT are described in detail in sections 5.1.3. and 5.1.4.)
5.3.4. Results
The following section presents the findings from a first administration of this test to 102
3- to 4-year-old Catalan-speaking children. First, the feasibility of the APT for preschool
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children (3- to 4-year-olds) and its prosodic appropriateness were analyzed. In the future, a
more in-depth analysis of the prosodic and gestural cues (see examples in Figure 4) used by
children to express various sociopragmatic meanings will be conducted.
FIGURE 4: Gestural cues used by children while performing the APT.
Feasibility of the APT for 3- to- 4-year-old children
Average pragmatic appropriateness scores by item indicated that the elicitation method
used by the test was feasible for use with 3- to 4-year old children. A large majority of the
children engaged in the activity to one degree or another, with only 4% of the group failing to
answer any item. Figure 5 shows the number of appropriate responses (i.e., scoring 1 or 2) on
the x-axis and the number of children (N) on the y-axis, in other words, how many children
were able to respond appropriately to a certain number of items. The results show that 51% of
the children (52 children) were able to respond appropriately to more than one-third of the test,
of which 15% responded appropriately to between half and two-thirds of the test and 9%
responded appropriately to more than the two-thirds of the items. The maximum number of
appropriate responses given by any one child was 28 out of 35.
FIGURE 5: Frequency distribution of pragmatically and prosodically appropriate responses by 3- and 4- year-
olds on the APT.
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These results confirm the general appropriateness of the test for preschool children in
terms of the elicitation technique applied.
Prosodic appropriateness as assessed by the APT
Successful performance on the task require certain perspective-taking abilities that allow
children to be able to take the perspective of a scenario character and enact the situation. In this
way, the proper testing can be performed if the child understands the instructions and the
procedure of the test. It is important to highlight that the absence of answer is not always due
to the incapability to produce appropriate prosody but rather indicates that the child faces
difficulties with the enacting of a specific situation. Therefore, if the child consistently does not
respond to the test items and does not enact the situations, it is rather can be explained by the
lack of the ability to take perspective but it cannot be ascertained by this assay whether the child
is able or unable to produce prosody. The feasibility results show that in this age children start
to engage to the activity and some children are capable to enact the situations and therefore give
an appropriate answer in terms of pragmatics and prosody to the large number of items.
Therefore, we decided to focus on the results of a subgroup of 36 children who responded
appropriately in terms of prosody to at least 11 items, in order to be able to assess the prosodic
profile of children at this age.
Prosodically appropriate responses by these 36 children were separated into pragmatic
areas. Figure 6 shows a summary of the prosodically appropriate responses by these 36 children
separated into pragmatic areas. The results show that 65% of them produced appropriate
responses to scenarios that focused on basic interaction skills (e.g., greetings, farewells,
expressions of gratitude). As for basic speech acts (statements, questions, imperatives,
vocatives), 49% of this subgroup successfully produced the target prosodic outcome in these
contexts. Forty-one percent produced sentences to express different affective and emotional
states such as insistence, discontent, guilt or sympathy (e.g., scolding request, regret,
congratulatory sentence), and 37% managed to correctly express emphasis or focus. Finally,
more complex sentence types encoding epistemic biases like uncertainty and obviousness in
statements or confirmation in questions were the most difficult area for expressive prosody at
this age. Only 17% of the children were able to successfully produce the right prosody with
these items. This suggests that, in general, these 3- to 4-year-old children had trouble
understanding the situations conveying pragmatic meanings related to beliefs and epistemic
status.
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FIGURE 6: Percentage of prosodically appropriate responses by children, separated by pragmatic areas.
The novelty of the APT tool lies in two main features, namely, (1) it provides
comprehensive coverage of socially appropriate pragmatic situations, which allows for the
assessment of pragmatic prosody; and (2) it uses a carefully controlled DCT elicitation method
which is enhanced by the use of illustrations. With regard to the prosodic skills of 3- to 4-year-
olds, our initial results revealed that, as expected, children at this age cope best with items
involving basic interaction skills, followed by basic speech act prosody, as well as prosody that
marks affective stance, information and contrastive focus, and least well with biased-sentences.
These results are in line with recent research on the developmental path of pragmatic prosody
production in preschool children (Armstrong & Hübscher, 2018). Though these results may be
regarded as an initial indication of the pragmatic prosodic skills available to 3- to 4-year-olds,
a more in-depth analysis of the development of pragmatic prosody in preschool-aged will be
carried out in the future.
Finally, our preliminary results suggest that, overall, the 35-item APT was usable with 3-
to 4-year old children, allowing the test administrator to obtain semi-spontaneous child speech
in a relatively short period of time. Though this preliminary version of the instrument was
written in Catalan, it can easily be adapted to other languages. This suggests that the APT has
the potential to be of great utility in future research across languages on the parallel
development of pragmatic and prosodic skills, particularly in very young children. Future
analyses will explore the obtained results in more detail from the point of view of prosody and
gesture. Concerning the older target group of this cross-sectional study, we expect 5- to 6-year-
old children to obtain higher scores and be able to express more pragmatic meanings such as
epistemically biased sentences.
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5.4. Study 4: The role of enactment in the development of pragmatic
abilities and ToM: a training study
5.4.1. Research question
While previous training studies have shown the beneficial effect of language
interventions on children’s cognitive development (e.g., Guajardo & Watson, 2002; Lohmann
& Tomasello, 2003; Ornaghi et al., 2011), little is known about whether perceiving and enacting
multimodal expressions of internal states and emotions can contribute to enhancing perspective
taking skills. The main research question of Study 4 will be to test whether embodied training
of children's own and other's mental and emotional states can contribute to improving their ToM
abilities and sociopragmatic competence.
5.4.2. Participants
The 102 children from Study 1 also were recruited to participate in Study 4. A total of 83 3-
to 4-year-old children participated in the experiment (37 male and 46 female, M age = 44.75
months, SD = 3.27 months; ranging from 39 to 51 months at the time of pretest). For various
reasons, nineteen children had to be excluded. Two children missed school and dropped out of
the experiment and seventeen children did not want to collaborate during either the pretests or
posttest showing restlessness or refusing to pay attention and to participate. Parents were
informed about the experiment’s goal and signed a written consent.
5.4.3. Materials
Four pre- and posttest measures were used from various tasks including (1) Emotion
Understanding (Izard et al., 2003); (2) the Mental Verb Comprehension Test (Astington &
Pelletier, 1998); (3) false belief tests: a Catalan adaptation of the Sally and Anne task (Baron-
Cohen et al., 1985) and the “Smarties task” (Gopnik & Astington, 1988); (4) the APT, or the
pragmatic and prosodic assessment (see sections 5.1.3. and 5.1.4. for the detailed description
of the tasks).
Materials for the training sessions
The materials for the training sessions were taken from the book “The Adventures of Jack
and Theo” (Ornaghi, Orlandi, & Perego, 2007) that had been specifically created for the study
by Ornaghi et al. (2011). The book comprises 16 stories that narrate the adventures of two
characters, the dolphin Jack and the shark Theo. The former 8 stories, arranged in order of
increasing difficulty, were translated and adapted for Catalan (a sample is provided in Appendix
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B). Then high-quality recordings of the stories read aloud in child-directed speech were made,
and videos with accompanying images from the original book were designed.
The eight target stories are enriched with internal lexicon terms, specifically expressing
mental state and emotional stances. A total of 12 metacognitive terms were used, namely a total
of 8 mental state terms and 4 emotional stance terms (see Table 4). In each of the 8 stories, two
internal states were highlighted: one mental state and one emotional state or two mental states.
Therefore across the 8 stories, 16 internal states were trained including 8 mental states that were
presented once and 4 emotional states that were presented twice, in two different stories.
Mental state terms Emotional stance terms
wanting
remembering
knowing
thinking
believing
deciding
doubting
wondering
getting delighted
getting upset
getting angry
getting scared/surprised
TABLE 4: Target mental lexicon terms selected for the training sessions.
5.4.4. Experimental procedure
Before and after the training intervention, each child was tested individually in a quiet
room by the author and three trained research assistants (see section 5.1.4. for the detailed
description of the procedure of each test).
Before training, the participants were assigned to three different condition groups, which
will be described in greater detail in the following subsection. In order to guarantee a
homogeneous distribution of children across the three conditions, a special algorithm was
written in Python. The algorithm was based on matching the participant’s scores from the four
pretest measures (emotion understanding, mental verb comprehension, ToM, and the APT).
The working principle of the algorithm is explained in Appendix C. Once the children were
distributed into groups according to the results of the algorithm, a separate one-way ANOVA
analysis (IBM SPSS Statistics v. 24) was run for each pretest measure to check that the three
groups were not statistically different. Results confirm that the different condition groups do
not significantly differ in any of the pretests (all p’s > .05). These results and descriptive
statistics are provided in Table 5.
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Measures M SD p
Emotion Understanding Test
multimodal language condition
language condition
control condition
47.3
48.2
47.5
17.6
18.1
16.7
.98
Mental verb comprehension
multimodal language condition
language condition
control condition
48.7
53.7
47.8
16.3
17.5
21.8
.46
Theory of Mind
multimodal language condition
language condition
control condition
40.4
41.7
35.8
24.6
23.0
23.4
.62
The APT (Pragmatic score)
multimodal language condition
language condition
control condition
19.5
20.9
22.8
14.3
13.8
16.9
.72
The APT (Enactment score)
multimodal language condition
language condition
control condition
23.8
25.9
28.7
17.3
15.6
21.4
.60
TABLE 5: Descriptive statistics for pretest measures.
Training sessions
The intervention took place over a four-week period and was aimed at improving
conceptual understanding of mental states and thinking about alternative perspectives. During
this phase, children participated in 8 sessions lasting between 20 and 25 minutes. Small groups
of about 12 children were trained twice per week on nonconsecutive days. All training sessions
took place in a quiet classroom at the children’s school and were videotaped. A summary of the
experimental procedure can be seen in Figure 7.
FIGURE 7: Experimental procedure of Study 4.
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The training contained three between-subject conditions: control condition, language
condition and multimodal language condition. In all conditions, at the beginning of each
training session, the children watched the story enriched with internal state lexicon (the whole
list of 12 trained terms is provided above in Table 4). The conditions differed in the activities
that were carried out after watching the story. Children in the control group carried out a non-
conversational activity related to the story, like drawing pictures and solving puzzles depicting
sea inhabitants. Children in the language condition were trained through a mini-conversation
which focused on target internal states and encouraged children to reflect about the internal
states of themselves and others. Children in the multimodal language condition were trained
through the mini-conversation but, importantly, children were also encouraged to enact the
internal states of the story characters.
Across all conditions, each training session followed a standard procedure and lasted the
same amount of time in all groups. In the language and multimodal conditions, a training script
was designed for each story (an example is given Table 6, see Appendix B for story sample).
All scripts followed the same scheme. First, a brief introduction of the story scene was presented
by the experimenter and then six questions were asked to the children in a fixed order. Four
question were the same across conditions (questions 1, 3, 4, 6 in black in Table 6), two question
differed across conditions (questions 2 and 4, in grey for language only condition (say), in green
for multimodal condition (say and do)).
Language only condition Multimodal condition
1. Do you remember that in the beginning of the story
Theo asked Sara Sea-Turtle: “What happened? Why
are you crying?” ... Today we are going to play using
the words “getting upset”.
Do you remember why Sara was upset and why did
she cry?
1. Do you remember that in the beginning of the story
Theo asked Sara Sea-Turtle: “What happened? Why
are you crying?” ... Today we are going to play using
the words “getting upset”.
Do you remember why Sara was upset and why did
she cry?
2.
What did Sara say when Theo found her stuck in a
hole?
2.
What did Sara do when Theo found her stuck in a
hole? Can you tell me what she was saying at the
same time?
3. What makes you upset? 3. What makes you upset?
4. What makes your friends upset? 4. What makes your friends upset?
5.
What would your friend say if his favorite toy broke?
5.
What would your friend say if his favorite toy broke?
What would he do in this situation? Can you show
me?
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6. Well, children, you’ve been very good. We’ve
played using the word...? (Children finish the
sentence)
6. Well, children, you’ve been very good. We’ve
played using the word...? (Children finish the
sentence)
TABLE 6: Sample script of training session. Story: “Sara Sea-Turtle” (see Appendix B), target term: getting upset.
Concerning the content of the questions, first the children were asked a question about
the recalled episode and were introduced the target term to be focused on during the training
session. Afterwards the children were invited to work out the situation and the target word: in
the language condition, it was carried out through a conversational procedure, by contrast, in
the multimodal language children were trained not only through a conversational procedure but
the children were also guided to enact the internal states. Figure 8 shows photographs of the
experimenter conducting a training session. Then children were asked to reflect on their own
emotional internal states. Subsequently they were asked to reflect on internal states of others.
Then children were provided with one more contextualized example and were asked to discuss
it (language only condition) or to discuss and enact it (multimodal condition).
Lastly, the experimenter concluded the first part of the session and commended the
children. Then the experimenter established a link between the fragment of the story that had
just been focused on and a new story’s episode that contained the second target term of the
training session. The second target internal state’s questions followed the same scheme. Finally,
children were invited to return to the class.
Throughout the training session, the experimenter encouraged participants to use the
target term as much as possible, she also motivated children to participate actively in the
conversation and ensured that all of them were involved in the activity.
FIGURE 8: Training session photographs.
Notes. Images on the left: language condition; images on the right: multimodal language condition.
In order to validate the training materials and scripts, prior to the experiment, a pilot study
was conducted. Comprehensibility of the stories and children’s interest in the training were
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tested with the 19 preschool children (3-year-old) from Girona who did not take part in the
study.
Each training session was conducted by two experimenters. Across all sessions, the same
experimenters worked with the children. The first experimenter performed the training activity.
The second controlled for the time of the training sessions and documented all events that took
place during the training session (e.g., the experimenter asks a question, children respond a
question). To do so, an annotation system of the online recoding of training sessions was
developed for the study. It included information about the experimenter’s actions (e.g., to repeat
a question, to reformulate a question, to give positive/negative feedback, to provide an example
etc.) and children’s actions (e.g., to comment something, to refuse to answer, to repeat the
experimenter’s multimodal actions). There were also special symbols for coding the type of
answer, feedback, and examples which could be verbal or multimodal (the whole annotation
system is provided in the Appendix D). In this way, for each group and each session,
information about the number of children’s answers, experimenter’s examples, and information
about the number of experimenter errors was collected. This data will be used to evaluate the
degree of active participation by children. After the completion of the session, each participant
was given an activity participation score by the two experimenters. The child’s participation,
concentration and adequacy of responses were given a separate mark. Then for each child an
average score on involvement in the training was calculated.
5.4.5. Expected results
We expect that children in both the language and multimodal conditions will significantly
improve their ToM, emotional, and perspective-taking performance in the posttests as
compared to children in the control group. Importantly, we hypothesise that training
intervention will affect not only ToM understanding but also those linguistic capacities that
require perspective-taking skills such as pragmatic and prosodic abilities.
Further, this study not only leads to widening the body of literature on sociopragmatic
development and ToM, but it also has the intention to develop an educational tool to aid
preschool teachers in incorporating multimodal aspects specifically designed to boost their
ToM skills into their classroom. An educational website with training materials and instructions
has been designed. The web page can be found at:
https://entrenemlesemocions.wordpress.com
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6. WORK PLAN
Previous work (September 2017 – January 2019)
• Establish contact with schools for Studies 1, 2, 3 and 4
• Organization of experimental design for Study 1, 2, 3 and 4
• Stimuli preparation for Study 3
• Development of training sessions for Study 4 in collaboration with Dr. Judith Holler
(Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands & Donders Institute for
Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, the Netherlands)
• Completion of stimuli materials for Study 2 in collaboration with Eva Castillo and Iris
Hübscher
o Filming, re-editing
• Carrying out of pilots for Study 1, 3 and 4 at Escola Verd, Girona
• Data collection for Study 1, 2, 3 and 4 at Escola Bogatell and Escola Antoni Brusi,
Barcelona
• Data preparation and preliminary data processing for Study 2 and 3
• Preliminary statistical analysis for Study 4
• Developing an educational web site for Study 4
• Attendance to the conference Speech Prosody 2018: Poznan, Poland, June 13-16, 2018.
• Oral presentation at Xe Workshop Sobre la Prosòdia del Català 2018: Barcelona,
Catalunya, June 28, 2018. Title: Avaluació d'habilitats pragmàtiques i prosòdiques dels
nens en edat preescolar. Co-authors: Pilar Prieto, Iris Hübscher & Ingrid Vilà-Giménez.
• Oral presentation at I Congreso Internacional sobre Didáctica de la Lengua Infantil:
Bilbao, Spain, November 14, 2018. Title: El efecto del entrenamiento multimodal en
potenciar habilidades de toma de perspectiva y competencia pragmática. Co-authors:
Pilar Prieto, Judith Holler, & Iris Hübscher.
• Writing and submission of the article based on Study 3 to the for the 19th International
Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Title: A new tool to assess pragmatic prosody in
children: evidence from 3- to 4-year-olds. Co-authors: Pilar Prieto, Iris Hübscher, &
Ingrid Vilà-Giménez.
• Writing and submission of the article based on the preliminary results of Study 2 to the
19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Title: Children’s imitation skills are
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positively correlated with sociopragmatic abilities. Co-authors: Pilar Prieto, Iris
Hübscher & Eva Castillo.
• Writing and submission of PhD research plan.
February 2019 – May 2019
• Defense of the PhD Research Plan (February 11th, 2019)
• Continue data processing for Study 2 and 3
• Data analysis for Study 1, 2 and 3
• Begin writing for Study 4
June 2019 – August 2019
• Attendance to the Workshop Sobre la Prosòdia del Català in Barcelona (Catalunya).
June, 2019.
• Attendance to the Phonetics and Phonology in Europe conference (PapE) in Lecce,
(Italy). 17-19 June, 2019.
• Attendance to the Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD) in Potsdam,
(Germany). 13-15 June, 2019.
• Attendance to the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in Melbourne
(Australia). 4-10 August, 2019.
September 2019 – December 2019
• Continue data analysis for Study 1, 2 and 3
• Writing for Study 1
• Writing for Study 2
• Establish contact with schools for the second part of Study 3
• Data collection for the second part of Study 3
January 2020 – July 2020
• Data analysis for the second part of Study 3
• Attendance to the International Conference on Speech Prosody 2020 - Location and
Dates TBA
September 2020 – December 2020
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• Writing for Study 3
• Begin writing for PhD thesis
January 2021 – April 2021
• PhD Thesis writing
May 2021 – July 2021
• PhD Thesis Defense
7. SELECTED REFERENCES
This book provides a comprehensive review of a broad range of topics in pragmatic
development research. Each chapter presents current theories and key empirical finding in the
respective domains. The topics include prelinguistic foundations of communication, the
acquisition of conventional language (language specific words and grammatical constructions),
non-literal language use (humor, metaphor and irony comprehension), and organising and
marking information. It also covers some overarching topics such as the assessment of
children’s pragmatic abilities. The volume is particularly important for the present thesis since
it laid the groundwork for all four studies that address main goals related to the role of
sociopragmatic abilities in children’s development.
This recent book edited by Prieto and Esteve-Gibert offers a complete state of the art on
prosodic development. The prosodic topics dealt with are very diverse in nature and are divided
in four sections, namely, early sensitivity to prosody, learning to produce prosody, moving to
meaning and interaction: prosody and pragmatic development, prosody in bilingualism and in
specific populations. The chapter “Set in time: Temporal coordination of prosody and gesture
Prieto, P., Esteve-Gibert, N. (Eds.). (2018). The Development of Prosody in First Language
Acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Matthews, D. (2014). Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
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in the development of spoken language production” by Rusiewicz and Esteve-Gibert discusses
the relationship between prosody and gesture which is particularly important for Study 3 of this
thesis. The third section on the interplay between prosody and pragmatics is also closely related
to the Study 3 which will add to these findings by applying a new tool to assess pragmatic
prosody in children. The chapter “Children’s development of internal state prosody” by
Armstrong and Hübscher presents an insightful literature survey on how children including
preschoolers use prosody to mark and comprehend affect and mental states of others which is
particularly important for Study 1 which aims to test the correlation between prosodic skills
and ToM abilities.
In this review article, Hübscher and Prieto show that gesture and prosody act as an
integrated system and play a scaffolding role in pragmatic acquisition through the analysis of
empirical results coming from developmental research in these domains. Importantly, the
evidence discussed in this paper demonstrates that children rely on gestural and prosodic cues
at different developmental stages. More specifically, the article discussed children’s
communicative behaviors between the ages of 1 and 5. This paper is of great interest for the
current PhD thesis, as it reports a summary of research on early pragmatic development
including preschool-aged children. It focuses on speech marking, information focus, epistemic
stance and politeness, pragmatic areas that will be explored in Study 3 from a multimodal
perspective. The authors advocate for the need of a multimodal approach in different domains
such as language intervention, which is crucial for Study 4.
The study by Bosco et al. (2018) aims to contribute to a further understanding of the
complex interplay between pragmatics and Theory of Mind abilities. It provides an exhaustive
overview on the correlation between these two capacities by taking into account both a
developmental and a clinical perspective. This article defends the position that pragmatics and
ToM constitute independent capacities. The authors indicate that pragmatics is often identified
Hübscher, I., Prieto, P. Gestural and prosodic development act as sister systems and jointly
pave the way for children’s sociopragmatic development. Submitted to Frontiers in
Psychology.
Bosco, F.M., Tirassa, M., Gabbatore, I. (2018). Why pragmatics and theory of mind do not
(completely) overlap. Front. Psychol. 9:1453.
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with ToM in empirical research due to the fact that the tasks used as a measure of ToM involve
both pragmatic and ToM competences, which leads to methodological problems in exploring
the relationship between the two. This article is particularly important for Study 1, as its aim is
to investigate how sociopragmatic abilities in preschool children correlate with their ToM
abilities.
Ornaghi et al. (2011) is another important study that for the current PhD thesis. In line
with other training studies (e.g., Lohmann & Tomasello, 2003), this study demonstrated that a
training involving linguistic interaction leads to improved performance on ToM tasks and
facilitates conceptual understanding of mental terms in 3- to 4-year-old children. The
methodology, of this study, as well as part of the training materials, were adapted for Study 4.
The main difference is that Study 4 will also test the effects of a multimodal enacting training.
In this way, while Ornaghi et al. (2011) had two conditions, namely, control and language
conditions, Study 4 has three conditions, namely, control, language and multimodal language.
Also, in the original study only the use of mental state language was trained, whereas Study 4
also involves emotional stance training.
Ornaghi V., Brockmeier J., Grazzani I. (2011). The role of language games in children’s
understanding of mental states: a training study. J. Cogn. Dev. 12, pp. 239–259.
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8. FULL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adamson, L. B., & Dimitrova, N. (2014). Joint attention and language development. In P.
Brooks & V. Kempe (Eds.), Encyclopedia of language development (pp. 299–304). Los
Angeles, CA: Sage Publications.
Andrés-Roqueta, C., & Katsos, N. (2017). The contribution of grammar, vocabulary and Theory
of Mind in pragmatic language competence in children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders.
Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 996.
Angeleri, R., & Airenti, G. (2014). The development of joke and irony understanding: A study
with 3- to 6-year-old children. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue
Canadienne de Psychologie Expérimentale, 68(2), 133–146.
Applebee, A. N. (1978). The child’s concept of story: ages two to seventeen. Chicago, IL:
Chicago Press.
Applebee, A. N. (1980). Children’s narratives: new directions. The Reading Teacher, 34, 137–
142.
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APPENDIX A: The Audiovisual Pragmatic Test (APT)
Familiarization item 1
This girl has a sister. And
what about you? Do you
have any sisters or
brothers?
Familiarization item 2
Imagine that your
grandmother surprisingly
visits you at home. She
knocks on the door and
you open it. What would
you say?
Test item 1
Imagine that you make a
new friend, you greet
each other shaking each
other’s hands. You want
to say to him “Hello!”
and tell him your name.
How would you say it?
Test item 2
Imagine that today you
have gone to the cinema
with your family, and
your little brother has
started talking loudly in
the middle of the movie in
a disrespectful manner.
What would you say to
make him be quiet?
Test item 3
Imagine that you mother
leaves for work. What
would you say as she is
walking out the door?
Test item 4
Imagine that your aunt is
cutting a cake. You are
very hungry and want to
ask her for a piece of
cake. What would you
say?
Test item 5
Imagine that you are
eating a piece of cake and
when you finish, your
aunt asks you “Do you
want more?”. What
would you say?
Test item 6
Imagine that you come
home and when you enter
the door you smell a pie,
it smells delicious. You
see your mother in the
kitchen and you know
that she just made your
favorite pie. What would
you say?
Test item 7
Imagine that your friend
has a muffin. You want a
little bit of it. What would
you say to your friend?
Test item 8
Imagine that your friend
gives you a half of his
muffin. What would you
say?
Test item 9
Imagine that you enter the
classroom in the
morning. What would
you say to your teacher?
Test item 10
Imagine that your friends
are playing with a ball.
You want to play with
them. What would you
say to your friends?
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Test item 11
Imagine that you want to
watch TV and you know
that normally your
parents do not allow you
to. How would you ask
permission from your
parents?
Test item 12
Imagine that you are
having lunch with your
friend’s parents. Your
friend’s mother offers
desert to you but you are
already full. What would
you say?
Test item 13
Imagine that today you
need to carry a lot of
things to school. What
would you say to your
brother if you want him to
help you?
Test item 14
Imagine that you and
your mother are having
breakfast together and
you spill milk all over the
table. What would you
say to your mother?
Test item 15
Imagine that one day your
mother comes with a very
big bag. You are very
interested in the bag.
What would you say to
your mother?
Test item 16
Imagine that your friend
participated in a poetry
competition and just
found out that he has lost.
What would you say to
him?
Test item 17
You go to a shop to buy a
bottle of water. When you
are there, a man in the
shop asks you what you
want to buy. What would
you say/answer?
Test item 18
You have come to visit
Joan with one of your
friends. You entered the
room and you
immediately saw that his
favorite toy was near the
door. A moment later
your friend tells you that
he has lost his toy and
asks you whether you
have seen it. What would
you say?
Test item 19
Your teacher has got her
hair cut and you think that
it suits her very well.
How would you say it?
Test item 20
Imagine that you are in
your grandmother’s
house and she is a bit
deaf. You just told her
that you want a snack
because you are very
hungry but she has not
heard your well and she
asks you “Do you want to
go for a walk?”. How
would you tell her that
that’s not what you want,
you want a snack instead?
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Test item 21
You have arrived at
school and your friend
Pau has not come. Maria
asks you if you know
why. Yesterday you saw
that Pau hardly kept his
eyes open and you think
that he might me ill. What
would you say to Maria?
Test item 22
Your friend just tripped
and fell down. What
would you say?
Test item 23
Imagine that there is a
new girl in your class.
You like music class very
much. One day you speak
with her and you want to
know if she is also taking
music class. How would
you ask her?
Test item 24
Imagine that you do not
like bananas. You are
having desert after lunch
and you mother gives you
one, sure that you like
them. She is very sure
about it. You want to tell
her that you do not like bananas. What would
say?
Test item 25
You and your friend Pau
come to school and you
think that you must hand
in homework that the
teacher asked you to do
but you are not sure.
What would you say to
the teacher?
Test item 26
Imagine that you have
two friends, Paula and
Marina, that did not know
each other. One day you
decide to present them to
each other. What would
you say?
Test item 27
Imagine that you enter
your friend Maria’s
house, but when you are
inside you cannot see her.
You think that she must
be in her room. Call her.
A few seconds go by and
nobody comes out. You
think that she might be
upstairs and you call her
once again.
Test item 28
Imagine that your friend
wants to invite you to
come over after school
but you also want to
invite him/her to come
over to your house. You
want to convince him/her
to come over to your
place. How would you
ask? What would you
say?
Test item 29
Imagine that your teacher
has asked you to paint
some pictures of the
fairytale “Little Red
Riding Hood” but it turns
out that she has made a
mistake and she is
showing you the fairytale
Test item 30
Imagine that your friend
Pere has participated in a
dress competition and just
found out that he has
won. What would you
say?
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“Puss in Boots”. What
would you say to her?
Test item 31
Imagine that you are in a
park with your family and
your parents ask you to
watch after your little
sister. She runs and goes
far from the park. You are
worried because many
cars pass by there. What
would you say to her?
Test item 32
Imagine that somebody
tells you that your friend,
Pau, has won a swimming
competition. You cannot
believe it because you
know that Pau cannot
swim. Ask again who is
the person that won the
swimming competition.
Test item 33
Imagine that you are with
your friend Núria and it
has been a long time since
you have had lunch
together. Suddenly, you hear that she has a
growling stomach. You
want to know if she is
hungry. Ask her.
Test item 34
Imagine that you are at
some friend’s party and
some of the other guests’
brothers are also there.
You are watching a movie but the little
brothers are making too
much noise and you
cannot hear anything in
the movie. Ask them to be
quiet.
Test item 35
Imagine that your friend
tells you that she went to
a restaurant for lunch and
tells you, surely, that she
got cat for lunch instead
of rabbit. You cannot
believe her and you are
very surprised. Ask her
again what she got for
lunch.
APPENDIX B: Sample story of the training materials (Study 4)
Story: “Sara Sea-Turtle” (target terms: believing, getting upset).
One day, Theo Shark was swimming along the bottom of the sea.
Suddenly, he heard a voice calling for help and he thought: “Someone is in
trouble or in danger”. He looked around and decided to try to find that person
and help them.
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He tried to figure out where the voice was coming from by swimming about
in all directions. When he came near some rocks he could hear the voice more
strongly. He went right up to the rocks and saw an opening between two of
them. He looked in and saw Sara Sea-Turtle who was crying. Theo asked her:
“What happened? Why are you crying?”.
Sara, upset and frightened, said: “I was gathering food for my little babies and
I saw some delicious shellfish in this hole. I thought that my little ones would
love them. I noticed that the hole was a bit small, but I decided to get in
anyhow and now I’m stuck inside here and can’t get out. Please help me!”.
Theo replied: “Of course, don’t worry, stay calm. I’ll go and call my friend
Jack Dolphin; he’s sure to know how to get you out of there”.
So Theo swum as fast as he could towards Jack’s house. When he got there,
he explained the situation to his friend, and Jack immediately had an idea: he
decided that they would take a very strong rope with them to pull the sea-turtle
out of the hole.
Together, Theo and Jack went back to Sara Sea-Turtle and when she saw
them she felt a lot calmer because she know that two friends would do their
best to get her out of the hole.
Theo Shark said: “We’re back, my friend Jack has brought a rope; now
you’ve got to hold it tightly between your teeth and we’ll try to pull you
out”. Sara, feeling much better now, said: “OK”. She thought to herself: “I’ve got
to try as hard as I can. I really hope it works!”.
Theo and Jack began to pull as strongly as they could, but no matter how hard
they tried, they could not get Sara out. “This isn’t working”, said Jack. “She’s
too stuck. We won’t be able to get her out on our own.”
So they decided to go and ask some other fish to help them.
“The more of us there are, the harder we will be able to pull!”, thought Jack.
After a while, Charlie Balloon Fish, Amadeus Hammerhead, Sally Eel and
even Diego Seahorse came to help too.
When Sara saw so many other fish coming to help her she felt better straight
away and tried even harder to free herself.
They all pulled on the rope as hard as they could, and after a number of
attempts, the sea-turtle finally popped out of the hole she had been stuck in.
Delighted to be free at last, she thanked Theo, Jack and all the other fish,
before rushing home to feed her babies.
From that day onwards, Sara never went through narrow openings again in
case she got stuck once more.
APPENDIX C: Script for group distribution (Study 4)
An algorithm was programmed to distribute children across the three conditions. This
algorithm measures the degree of similarity between different test scores and assigns the
participants to experimental conditions while taking into account children's class distribution
and preserving general similarity of the distributions by conditions.
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The participants are allocated to a certain condition on the the basis on four test scores:
Emotion Understanding, Mental Verb Comprehension, ToM and the Pragmatic Test. The
division of participants into groups is undertaken in three steps. First, the distance between two
participants' scores is calculated. In order to do so, the cosine between four-dimentional vectors
(corresponding to the four tests) is measured. Then, the distance matrix of all class participants
is obtained. Thus, the closer the vectors are, the smaller the distantance is. Afterwards, a
minimum of all distances and its location (a vector) are calculated, which results in close vector
pairs. Finally, the algorithm stops when one of the groups contains half of the participants. The
remaining children are assigned to the other group.
APPENDIX D: Annotation system of online recoding of training sessions (Study 4)
Children's actions:
R1 – response of one child;
R2 – response of the second child;
R3 – response of the third child;
R4, R5...
R – response of children (all together);
RNeg – children don't want to answer a question;
R1Neg – a particular child doesn't want to answer a question;
R2Neg – the second child doesn't want to answer a question;
R3Neg, R4Neg...
Rm – multimodal response of children (enactment);
R1m, R2m, R3m....
Rv – verbal response to multimodal question;
R1v, R2v...
C1, C2, C3 – children's comments (a child decides to say something without been asked a question);
M – children repeat the experimenter multimodal actions.
Experimenter’s actions:
Q – experimenter asks a question to everyone;
2Q- experimenter repeats a question to everyone;
Q+ – experimenter reformulates a question to everyone;
Q1 – experimenter asks a question referring to a particular child;
Q2 – experimenter asks a question referring to another child (the second child);
Q3, Q4, Q5...
2Q1, 2Q2 – experimenter repeats a question and asks to answer a particular child;
FPos – positive feedback;
Fneg – negative feedback;
TRep – experimenter encourages children to repeat a term;
A – experimenter answers a question;
Ex – experimenter provides a verbal example;
Ex+ – experimenter provides an additional verbal example;
Exm – experimenter provides a multimodal example;
Ex+m – experimenter provides an additional multimodal example;
ME – experimenter does a multimodal action but not an example;
– experimenter invites children to stand up to enact;
– experimenter invites children to sit down to continue with the training;
End – experimenter concludes the training session and invites children to return to the class.
