Event Abstract

Back to Event

Developmental trajectories of socio-pragmatic abilities and a preliminary investigation of culture-based differences in a sample of Finnish and Italian children

Ilaria Gabbatore1, 2*, Leena Mäkinen1, Francesca M. Bosco2, 3, Eeva Leinonen4 and Soile Loukusa1
  • 1 University of Oulu, Faculty of Humanities, Finland
  • 2 Università degli Studi di Torino, Department of Psychology, Italy
  • 3 Università degli Studi di Torino, Neuroscience Institute of Turin, Italy
  • 4 Murdoch University, Australia

Introduction Pragmatic abilities such as understanding implicit meaning1, taking into account all the relevant cues beyond the propositional content2, comprehending discrepancies between literal and intended meaning3 and handling communicative failures4, develop with age. Pragmatic capacity calls for linguistic, cognitive and social abilities5. In communicative interaction, individuals are required to take into account other people’s mental states i.e. Theory of Mind (ToM)6, and several studies have showed a relationship between pragmatic and ToM abilities7,3,8. Such abilities have an effect on how one behaves in social situations and a comprehensive understanding of pragmatic development is relevant to understanding how social skills develop and how quality of life can be enhanced or disrupted. Beside the developmental trajectories, linguistic and cultural components deserve attention, since beyond individual differences, distinct communicative styles may depend on culturally learnt patterns of appropriate communicative behaviors and expectations and assumptions about other people and surrounding context may play a role9. Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies contribute to the understanding of pragmatic development: research in areas such as nonverbal interaction, referential communication and politeness are enriched by evidence on how children acquire different languages in different cultures and contexts. Many aspects of communicative competence may display a wide cross-cultural variation as, for example, the way communicative partners’ background knowledge is taken into consideration10. Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural methodologies were already applied to morphosyntactic and semantic development11. Given that pragmatics consists of an integrative system of expressive means in relation to the ongoing interaction, such approach looks promising for pragmatics, too12. This study investigates the development of the socio-pragmatic abilities in Italian typically developing (TD) children, using the Finnish Pragma test13, translated and adapted to Italian language14. Pragma was successfully used to assess pragmatic development in typical13 and atypical15 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 children’s developmental pattern to that of the Finnish children, to examine any possible differences and similarities. While Italy and Finland are both European countries, several differences characterize the communicative styles of the different cultural contexts. Methods Sample: The Italian sample consists of 150 TD Italian children, ranging in age from 4 to 8 years (74 females). The sample is organized into subgroups in terms of age: A(4-4;11), B(5-5;11), C(6-6;11), D(7-7;11), E(8-8;11) (years;months). Inclusion criteria were: speaking Italian as mother tongue, monolingual speakers, and absence of any developmental diagnosis or delay. The Italian children’s performance was compared to that of a group of Finnish children13, comparable in terms of age, gender distribution and linguistic/developmental features. Material: The Pragma test assesses socio-pragmatic development, by providing the children 39 different short scenarios, using pictures and plastic characters, to minimize memory requirements: Contextual inference without ToM demand (ConNoToM): deriving conclusion by connecting information from different sources; Contextual inference with ToM demand (ConToM): deriving conclusion by connecting information including others’ mental states; Feelings recognition (Feelings): understanding others’ feelings based on given contextual cues. Relevant language use (R.L.U.): identifying a proper way of professing a message in order to achieve a goal in a given situation; False belief (FB): dealing with basic ToM tasks. The Pragma test has been translated and adapted into Italian 14, by a group of experts in pragmatics, utilizing cross-check procedures to ensure adherence to the Finnish version appropriateness of the contents in the Italian culture. A pilot study was conducted. Results When considering the total score of the Pragma test within the Italian sample, a one-way ANOVA revealed an effect of age on the children’s performance (F = 58.49; p < .001; η²p = .617). Bonferroni pairwise comparisons revealed significant differences between group A(4-4;11) and B(5-5;11) and B and C(6-6;11) (p < .001). No differences were detected in the older groups (.122 < p < .451) when comparing between adjacent age groups. A repeated-measure ANOVA assessed the performance at each type of pragmatic task (within factor), including as a between factor the age group. The analysis detected a significant effect of the type of task (F = 82.79; p < .001; η²p = .36) and of the age group (F = 51.93; p < .001; η²p = .59). Figure 1. The comparison with the Finnish sample revealed a similar developmental pattern, even if an effect of the cultural background was detected in the overall score of Pragma (F = 9.47; p < .002), despite a low effect size (η²p = .029). Separate analyses within each age-group, revealed no effect of nationality in the youngest children of group A(4-4;11) (F = 9.32; p = .34; η²= .016), and a moderate effect in groups B(5-5;11) (F = 4.22; p = .045; η²p = .06) and C(6-6;11) (F = 4.35; p = .04; η² = .06); a stronger effect was detected in groups D(7-7;11) (F = 8.21; p = .006; η² = .12) and E(8-8;11) (F = 9.08; p =.004; η² = .14). Figure 2. Discussion and conclusion The Italian children showed a developmental trend in all the pragmatic tasks, which seemed to stabilize at around 7 years of age, in line with previous studies3. The effect of the type of task suggests that Pragma is sensitive to different degrees of complexity required for each pragmatic skill investigated13 in relation to the Italian version of the test. A comparison of the development the Italian children with a group of Finnish children revealed some differences, which become more pronounced, as the children grow older. The slightly better performance of the Finnish children may be related to schooling, and we can suggest that the well-performing Finnish school system16 might play a role here. Such data suggest that cross-cultural and cross-linguistic studies deserve attention in a globalizing society characterized by multicultural societies. The utilization of Pragma, the pragmatic research tool in this study has shown that language use reflects cultural differences. This is a preliminary study, but this work helps us to begin to explore and understand the role of culture in pragmatic development.

Figure 1
Image
Figure 2
Image

Acknowledgements

The research was funded by MIUR PRIN (Progetti di Ricerca di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale) 2017, project “The Interpretative Brain: Understanding and Promoting Pragmatic Abilities across Lifespan and in Mental Illness,” project code 201577HA9M.

References

1. Loukusa S, Ryder N, Leinonen E. Answering questions and explaining answers: A study of Finnish-speaking children. J Psycholinguist Res. 2008;37(3):219-241.
2. Bosco FM, Angeleri R, Colle L, Sacco K, Bara BG. Communicative abilities in children: An assessment through different phenomena and expressive means. J Child Lang. 2013;40(4):741-778.
3. Bosco FM, Gabbatore I. Sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts and the role of the theory of mind in childhood. Front Psychol. 2017;8.
4. Bosco FM, Gabbatore I. Theory of mind in recognizing and recovering communicative failures. Appl Psycholinguist. 2017;38(1).
5. Cummings L. Pragmatics: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. L. Erlbaum Associates; 2005.
6. Premack D, Woodruff G. Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behav Brain Sci. 1978;1(4):515-526.
7. Bosco FM, Parola A, Sacco K, Zettin M, Angeleri R. Communicative-pragmatic disorders in traumatic brain injury: The role of theory of mind and executive functions. Brain Lang. 2017.
8. Miller CA. Developmental relationships between language and theory of mind. Am J Speech-Language Pathol. 2006;15(2):142-154.
9. Nureddeen FA. Cross cultural pragmatics: Apology strategies in Sudanese Arabic. J Pragmat. 2008;40(2):279-306.
10. Küntay A, Nakamura K, Ateş-Şen AB. Crosslinguistic and crosscultural approaches to pragmatic development. Pragmatic Dev first Lang Acquis. 2014:317-341.
11. Stoll S, Abbot-Smith K, Lieven E. Lexically Restricted Utterances in Russian, German, and English Child-Directed Speech. Cogn Sci. 2009;33(1):75-103.
12. Küntay AC. Crosslinguistic research. Res Methods Child Lang A Pract Guid. 2012:285-299.
13. Loukusa S, Mäkinen L, Gabbatore I, Laukkanen-Nevala P, Leinonen E. Understanding Contextual and Social Meaning in Typically Developing Finnish-Speaking Four- To Eight-Year-Old Children. Psychol Lang Commun. 2017;21(1):408-428.
14. Gabbatore I, Bosco FM, Mäkinen L, Loukusa S. Socio-pragmatic competence and cognitive abilities: Preliminary data from the Finnish Pragma test on a sample of Italian normally-developing children. BCCCD 2017,Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development. 5-7 January, 2017, Budapest, Hungary.
15. Loukusa, S, Mäkinen, L., Kuusikko-Gauffin, S., Ebeling, H. & Leinonen, E. (in press). Assessing social-pragmatic inferencing skills in children with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Communication Disorders.
16. Sahlberg P. Education policies for raising student learning: the Finnish approach. J Educ Policy. 2007;22(2):147-171.

Keywords: pragmatic development, Pragmatic abilities, Cross-cultural, Language, Communication

Conference: XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference, Pavia, Italy, 30 May - 1 Jun, 2018.

Presentation Type: Poster or Oral

Topic: Experimental Pragmatics

Citation: Gabbatore I, Mäkinen L, Bosco FM, Leinonen E and Loukusa S (2018). Developmental trajectories of socio-pragmatic abilities and a preliminary investigation of culture-based differences in a sample of Finnish and Italian children. Front. Psychol. Conference Abstract: XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference. doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2018.73.00024

Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.

The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.

Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.

For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.

Received: 15 May 2018; Published Online: 14 Dec 2018.

* Correspondence: Dr. Ilaria Gabbatore, University of Oulu, Faculty of Humanities, Oulu, Finland, ilaria.gabbatore@unito.it