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The development of polite stance in preschoolers: how prosody, gesture, and body cues pave the way

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2019

Iris HÜBSCHER Open the ORCID record for Iris HÜBSCHER [Opens in a new window] ,
Martina GARUFI  and
Pilar PRIETO
Iris HÜBSCHER*
Affiliation:
Departament de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Catalunya URPP Language and Space, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Martina GARUFI
Affiliation:
Scuola di lettere e beni culturali, Università di Bologna, Italy
Pilar PRIETO
Affiliation:
Departament de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Catalunya Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, ICREA, Barcelona, Catalunya
*
*Corresponding author. Email: iriscarmela.huebscher@uzh.ch
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Abstract

Gesture and prosody are considered to be important precursors in early language development. In the present study, we ask whether those cues play a similar role later in children's acquisition of more complex pragmatic skills, such as politeness. 64 three- to five-year-old Catalan-dominant children participated in a request production task in four different conditions. They were prompted to request an object from either a classmate or an unfamiliar adult experimenter, with the implied cost of the request to the receiver's face thus being either high or low. Results showed that these preschool-age children used mitigating prosodic and gestural strategies to encode politeness earlier and more often than they used lexical or morphosyntactic markers, and that those cues develop incrementally during the preschool years. These findings suggest that prosody, gesture, and other body signals are an essential first step in the development of children's socio-pragmatic competence.

Keywords

polite stancepoliteness acquisitionprosodyface and body cuesprosodic mitigationgestural mitigationsocio-pragmatic development
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 46 , Issue 5 , September 2019 , pp. 825 - 862
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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