2 Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Italy; 3 GIPSI - research Group on. Inferential Processes in Social Interaction; 4 Neuroscience Institute of Torino, ...
Child Language Research Center, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oulu, Finland; 2 Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Italy; 3 GIPSI - research Group on Inferential Processes in Social Interaction; 4 Neuroscience Institute of Torino, University of Turin, Italy; 5 Murdoch University, Perth, Australia.
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Developmental trajectories of socio-pragmatic abilities and a preliminary investigation of culture-based differences in a sample of Finnish and Italian children I. Gabbatore 1,2,3 – L. Mäkinen1 - F.M. Bosco2,3,4 – E. Leinonen5 - S. Loukusa1
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INTRODUCTION
Pragmatic abilities develop with age (Bosco et al., 2103). They call for linguistic, cognitive and social abilities and several studies have showed a relationship between pragmatics and Theory of Mind (Bosco & Gabbatore, 2017) . Many aspects of communicative competence may display cross-cultural variation as, for example, the way communicative partners’ background knowledge is taken into consideration (Küntay et al., 2014). Research within nonverbal interaction, referential communication and politeness are enriched by data on how children acquire different languages in different cultures. Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural methodologies were already applied to morphosyntactic and semantic development (Stoll et al., 2009). As pragmatics consists of an integrative system of expressive means in relation to the ongoing interaction, such approach looks promising for pragmatics, too (Küntay 2012). This study investigates the development of the socio-pragmatic abilities in Italian typically developing (TD) children, using the Finnish Pragma test (Loukusa et al., 2017), translated and adapted to Italian language (Gabbatore et al., 2017). Pragma was already successfully used to assess pragmatic development in typical (Loukusa et al., 2008) and atypical (Loukusa et al., 2018) Finnish children. This study aims to investigate, with the Pragma tool, the development of children’s pragmatic performance in an Italian context. Moreover, in light of cross-cultural considerations, we compared the Italian and Finnish children’s developmental pattern, to examine any possible differences and similarities. Several differences may, indeed, characterize the communicative styles also within Europe.
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RESULTS
Italian sample One-way ANOVA revealed an effect of age on the children’s performance at the total score of Pragma (F=58.49; p
