Saturday 25 July 08:15
- 09:45
Hall: 13 - Room 10 SA
Chair:
Visu-Petra Laura
Division: Division 5: Education and School Psychology
Children grow up in a highly variable world and progressively learn to interact and communicate with their social environment. Effective communication goes beyond the simple, literal meaning of words and involves the pragmatic inferences they have to make about the internal states, e.g., needs or intentions, of their interaction partners. Our symposium aims to provide insight into how this individual and environmental variability influences these pragmatic aspects of their communication. Language skills provide the basic tools for both articulating and disguising communicative intent. The first study from the University of Zurich uses communicative tasks to reveal that bilingual children (4-5 years), endowed with a greater repertoire of communicative means, are better at adapting to the communicative needs of their interaction partner than monolingual children. The second study involves slightly older Polish children (6-10 years) in a task eliciting truthful or deceptive communication by manipulating payoff rates for the child (the sender) and a fictional partner (the receiver). The third contribution takes us even further down the developmental pathway (8-13 year-olds) and investigates how pragmatic communication (sincere or deceptive) is modulated by parental influences in a sample of Dutch children. Finally, the last two contributions move the spotlight to the parents themselves in two cultural contexts (France and Romania), relating their parenting by lying practices (use of deception to elicit children's conformity or protect their feelings) to their socialization of honesty in children and their general parenting practices. To summarize, our symposium brings together five distinct cultural contexts in which children's pragmatic communicative skills develop in interaction with contextual (parental, language) factors that affect their competence and motivation to rely on sincere and deceptive statements in their expanding repertoire of social exchanges.
