35.2686, Calls: Pragmatic Language Development in Young Children (workshop proposal for SLE 2025)

Wed Oct 2 02:05:09 UTC 2024

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2686. Wed Oct 02 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2686, Calls: Pragmatic Language Development in Young Children (workshop proposal for SLE 2025)

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Date: 27-Sep-2024
From: Maria Rosenberg [maria.rosenberg at umu.se]
Subject: Pragmatic Language Development in Young Children (workshop proposal for SLE 2025)

Full Title: Pragmatic Language Development in Young Children (workshop
proposal for SLE 2025)
Short Title: PLD

Date: 26-Aug-2025 - 29-Aug-2025
Location: Bordeaux, France
Contact Person: Tove Nilsson Gerholm
Meeting Email: tove at ling.su.se
Web Site: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2025/workshop-proposals/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Language Acquisition;
Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics

Call Deadline: 07-Nov-2024

Meeting Description:

We are proposing a workshop entitled “Pragmatic language development
in young children” for the Societas Linguistica Europaea 2025
conference and would like to invite contributions (see submission
details below).

Pragmatic language skills refer to the use of language within social
situations. They emerge early in development (Longobardi et al. 2017)
and cover many verbal and non-verbal skills (e.g., intention
recognition, sticking to the topic) (Socher et al. 2019). Although
pragmatic language development is quite well described, we still lack
a clear understanding of its nature and growth (Papafragou 2018).

Measures of young children’s pragmatic language have been found to
strongly correlate to their core language skills (grammar, vocabulary)
(Wilson & Bishop 2022) and might therefore predict later language
ability outcomes (Matthews et al. 2018). The high and consistent
correlations between pragmatics and core language during language
development (De Rosnay et al. 2014), however, might depend on the near
impossibility to design a pragmatic test entirely free from core
language aspects, and/or it might be the case that pragmatic and core
language skills interact during early language development, but later
be separating (Wilson & Bishop 2022).

Moreover, given the heterogeneity of pragmatics, being more of a
family of skills than a domain (Matthews et al. 2018), some pragmatic
language skills can be assumed to have stronger associations with some
grammatical and/or broader developmental-behavioral skills than
others. The view of pragmatics as a family of skills, then, would
possibly account for why children with age adequate core language
skills may underperform in specific pragmatic skills (e.g.,
implicature processing) (Wilson & Bishop 2022). To understand the
development of pragmatic abilities, we need to know more about their
longitudinal association with core language (Rudling et al. 2023), and
also with other developmental and behavioral domains (Bishop et al.
2016). A problem for reaching this goal, however, is that available
measures of pragmatic skills differ in coverage, focus, and quality
(Matthews et al. 2018).

The aim of this workshop proposal is to bring together studies on how
to measure and evaluate the early pragmatic language development among
children between the ages 1–7. The workshop is open for researchers
from different theoretical and methodological backgrounds interested
in how pragmatic language develops in early childhood and how it
relates to other domains of language or cognition. The focus lies on
pragmatic language skills: how children use their developing
linguistic knowledge to communicate. Other important aspects to
consider in relation to pragmatic language development are variability
and shift over time, multilingualism, as well as social, cultural, and
gender differences. We thus welcome contributions that build on
different types of qualitative or quantitative data to address these
issues.

Key research questions include, but are not limited to, the following:
 • How do pragmatic language skills develop in young children (e.g.,
how do skills differ in saliency, between individuals/groups, over
time)? To what extent can we identify potential taxonomies of
pragmatic skills?
 • How can we measure pragmatic language development? What types of
methods should we apply to study young children’s pragmatic language
development?
 • What associations can be found between children’s pragmatic and
grammatical skills (e.g., by looking at developmentally salient
syntactic and morphological constructions)?
 • What associations can be found between pragmatic language skills
and measures of cognitive and behavioral skills (e.g., motor,
problem-solving, personal-social)?

The workshop will contribute to expand on our current understanding of
pragmatic language development as it appears in various types of data.

Call for Papers:

Interested colleagues should submit a 300-word abstract (excl.
references) for 20-minute talks by 7 November 2024 to tove at ling.su.se
and maria.rosenberg at umu.se. We will make selections and inform all
presenters of acceptance of their abstracts before the workshop
proposal is submitted to the SLE by 20 November 2024. (If the workshop
proposal is accepted, presenters will be asked to submit a 500-word
abstract in EasyChair by 15 January 2025.)

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