Metapragmatic awareness development in Chinese Children: A conversational competence perspective

Abstract

The current study investigates the development of metapragmatic awareness in conversational competence among Chinese children aged 4–12 years. Utilizing eight cartoons, children were engaged with a series of metapragmatic questions targeting violations of four maxims of cooperation. By assessing their performance in a task involving conversational principles, we explore the progression of their metapragmatic skills. The results shows i) The metapragmatic awareness in different age groups increased. The early school-age stage was the transitional period in the development of children's metapragmatic awareness. The development range of metapragmatic awareness did not continuously increase in the later school-age stage. ii) Metacognitive awareness was in the salient position in the preschool stage, and in the early school-age stage metarepresentational awareness was predominant. Three forms of metapragmatic awareness did not develop sequentially. iii) The Chinese paratactic language structures and their profound cultural backgrounds influenced children's performance of metapragmatic awareness. This research provides a new paradigm for developmental pragmatics and it has a certain value for the treatment and intervention of the children with pragmatic impairments.