Discourse Practices from Childhood to Adulthood

Liliana Tolchinsky^1*Ruth A. Berman²Julie Dockrell³

• ¹University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
• ²Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel
• ³University of London, London, United Kingdom

Language development does not end with the attainment of native-speaker status. Across later childhood, adolescence, and even into adulthood, individuals continue to refine, reorganize, and expand the linguistic and multimodal resources that enable them to participate effectively in the diverse discursive practices that shape educational trajectories, social relationships, and active participation in different communicative contexts. While early language acquisition has been extensively described, far less is known about how speakers move from basic native-like communicative competence to the sophisticated, contextsensitive, and socially anchored uses of language that characterise proficient discourse practices. This special issue brings together seven original studies that address this shift by examining discursive practices in later language development (LLD) across linguistic, cognitive, socio-cultural, pragmatic, and affective dimensions.Our starting point is the observation that children who have mastered the sound system, grammar, and lexicon of their language are not yet fully proficient communicators. They still need to learn to navigate a range of discourse domains: constructing arguments in writing, managing peer interaction, interpreting and generating figurative language, integrating multimodal cues, understanding feedback as dialogue, and coordinating language with social expectations and interpersonal dynamics. Developing proficiency in these diverse areas involves the interplay of multiple factors-maturational constraints, schooling experiences, linguistic environments, communicative goals, and the characteristics of the interlocutors. The studies included in the present research topic address these interactions, highlighting how growth in discourse abilities emerges from dynamic systems rather than on the basis of a linear accumulation of skills.The issue opens with Lemen et al. study that examines children's comprehension of complex because and if sentences serving different pragmatic functions. Their findings show that neither cognitive complexity nor input frequency alone accounts for performance; instead, comprehension emerges at the intersection of linguistic structure, pragmatic relevance, and the contexts in which children encounter different utterance types.The following two contributions focus on lexical and rhetorical development in school-aged children. The study by Stavans and Zadurnasky provides a fine-grained account of rhetorical competence in Hebrew-speaking children's argumentative writing by tracing the developmental reorganization of discourse stance in the early school grades, from ages 7 to 10. Their findings reveal a shift from a writer-centered, emotional, and personal discourse stance to more text-oriented, epistemic, and generic formulations, underscoring not only the expansion of speakerwriters' perspectives, but also their progressive integration into coherent rhetorical attitudes.Zwilling and Ravid's research complements the foregoing study, by considering lexical development in Hebrew peer conversations across childhood and adolescence. Their corpus-based analysis shows how the distribution of what they term content and discourse words evolves in triadic peer talk, reflecting not only linguistic growth but also changes in social cognition, interactional expectations, and the pragmatic contribution of lexical usage in collaborative discourse.The next group of contributions addresses pragmatic and conceptual dimensions of discourse practices, emphasizing how communicative purposes, interlocutor characteristics, and contextual constraints shape developmental trajectories. Schariau et al. analyze the use of metaphors in dialogic explanations addressed to listeners with varying levels of expertise. Contrary to the expectation that metaphor use decreases with increasing expertise, they find the opposite pattern, so demonstrating that metaphor use is not merely a conceptual tool for novices but a flexible resource shaped by interactional context and communicative intent.Hess-Zimmermann and colleagues explore Mexican adolescents' metapragmatic reflections on verbal irony, demonstrating that interpretations of ironic criticism and praise are sensitive to age, the gender of the person using irony, and culturally shaped gender-role expectations. The study illuminates the development of pragmatic awareness in adolescence as young people begin to coordinate linguistic forms with nuanced social meanings.The final two studies extend the notion of discursive development to school-based genres, instructional contexts, and feedback practices. Aparici and colleagues investigate analytical essay writing across monolingual and bilingual students from elementary school to university, demonstrating how linguistic background (mono-and bi-lingual) interacts with developmental stage and pedagogical input to shape structural, syntacticdiscursive, and lexical features of writing. Their findings reveal that growth in analytical writing is driven not only by linguistic background but also by the complex interplay of age-related development, genre-oriented instruction, and teachers' evaluative practices.Tao and Qin, focusing on Chinese-speaking adolescents learning English as a foreign language, shift focus written qualitative feedback as a means of communicative interaction. Their mixedmethods study shows how adolescents conceptualize feedback-sometimes as guidance, sometimes as evaluation, sometimes as dialogic exchange-and how these approaches mediate their engagement with writing and their development of higher-order argumentative skills. Together, these studies highlight schooling as a key site where language users learn to integrate cognitive, rhetorical, and interpersonal demands of academic discourse.Taken together, the contributions to this research topic illustrate the richness and complexity of later language development as a multi-layered phenomenon. They show that discourse practices emerge not only from the growth of linguistic knowledge but from the dynamic interplay among cognitive resources, genre expectations, instructional support, cultural norms, and interactional contexts. By integrating perspectives from psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and educational linguistics, these studies advance our understanding of how children and adolescents become proficient communicators in the worlds they inhabit-and the worlds they are learning to enter.We hope that these studies will stimulate further research into the mechanisms, contexts, and trajectories of discourse development beyond early childhood, and so contribute to a more comprehensive theory of how language users build sophisticated, context-sensitive, and socially meaningful communicative competence across the lifespan.