The Acquisition of Performatives Prior to Speech.

TLDR

Child language research has largely focused on internal speech structure or adult input, assuming children’s entry into communication, while philosophical work by Austin highlights that some utterances are performative acts rather than mere descriptions. The study aims to identify the cognitive and social precursors that enable children to discover communicative intent. Using speech act theory and performative analysis as a conceptual framework, the authors examined early communicative intentions. They found that intentional communication begins with the very first uses of speech.

Abstract

Why does a child learn to talk? Where does he get the idea of communication in the first place? The vast majority of developmental language studies are addressed to the internal structure of early speech, or to the nature of adult linguistic input to children. The child's entry into this same communicative network is hence taken for granted. In this study, we have examined the onset of intentional communication before begins, and traced it to the very first uses of speech. In particular, we were interested in the cognitive and social developments that prepare the child for the discovery of com munication. As a framework for research on the development of communica tive intentions, we have based our study on recent work in philosophy of language and linguistic semantics, in an area referred to as speech act theory or performative analysis. The impetus for this work comes in large measure from the philosopher J. Austin (1962). Austin stressed the inadequacy of traditional analyses of sentences into propositions which must either be true or false. Instead, he sug gested that some sentences are not descriptions of events, but events in themselves—acts that are carried out when a sentence is used