Pragmatic metalinguistic ability in school age children

Abstract

This study lies within the interaction between Psycholinguistic studies, with regard to the pragmatic metalinguistic awareness; and on the Inferential Pragmatic studies regarding the understanding of deictic 'here' and a direct illocutionary/perlocutionary speech act. The aim was to outline a reflection on the pragmatic metalinguistic behavior of school age children in relation to the realization of a promise in a threatening tone and spatial localization mechanism of dialogue. This meta-linguistic ability is the individual's ability to reflect on the contextual aspects that determine the use of language, as well as to manipulate information arising from this relationship (GOMBERT, 1992). For example, to understand a speech act, speakers rely on linguistic information and in the context where verbal interaction occurs. The illocutionary speech act is an example of this relationship, as the context and language information determines/trigger performing an action. In this example, the use of deixis place (LEVINSON, 2007) indicates the location where the verbal interaction occurs, allowing to observe the relationship between the utterance and the context where speech. The participants are eight children between seven and ten years old, students of a municipal school in the city of Jaguarão/RS. As an instrument, was applied a task containing two interactive situations, adapted from an investigation into the inferential processing and understanding of implicit (FLÔRES et al., 2013). Most of the participants were inefficient in the appropriation of contextual information, especially the act speech of promise. Regarding the understanding of deictic 'here', participants used contextual information to justify their choices. In general, this work intends to assist in reflections on the metalinguistic skills in children and contribute to discussions in the field of Pragmatics.