Expressive Pragmatics and Prosody in Young Preschoolers are More Closely Related to Structural Language than to Mentalizing

ABSTRACT

Pragmatics lies at the point where language meets the social world and encompasses both the linguistic and the social dimensions of communication. However, the relationship between pragmatic abilities, other language skills, and socio-cognitive aspects such as mentalizing is still a matter of wide debate. This study sets out to investigate the status of pragmatic abilities by testing from a developmental angle their relationship with other linguistic skills and mentalizing. We examined the role of structural language and mentalizing on both expressive pragmatic and prosodic skills in typically developing preschool children. A total of 105 3-to 4-year-old children were assessed on pragmatics and prosody with the Audiovisual Pragmatic Test, as well as on structural language skills (vocabulary and syntax) and a series of mentalizing measures (false belief, emotion understanding, and metacognitive vocabulary). A combined approach including correlations, regressions, and structural equation modeling (SEM) was used. Structural language was a strong positive predictor of both pragmatic and prosodic scores, while mentalizing predicted neither pragmatic nor prosodic performance. We suggest that in preschool years, expressive pragmatics and prosodic skills are more closely related to structural language skills than to mentalizing.

Acknowledgement

We thank the tutors and coordinators of the two participating schools in Barcelona, Escola Antoni Brusi and Escola Bogatell, and all the children and their families for having participated in this study. We are grateful to our research assistants Eva Castillo, Anna Massanas, Ainhoa David, and Júlia Florit for help in data collection. We are also thankful to Irene Ceccato for the help with SEM models.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The dataset and the code used to run the analyses in R are available in the Open Science Framework repository – https://osf.io/jy4wv.

Notes

¹ Prosodic data were available for 86 participants, due to missing or poor-quality audiovisual recordings, and SES data were available for 94 children, since not all parents provided information about their occupations (89% of parents completed questionnaire responses). Data for the rest of the variables are based on the full sample of 105 participants.

² https://osf.io/pyc34/?view_only = c5cfa653094a454dae1990fcbc8722c9

³ The Renfrew Bus Story Test is a comprehensive measure of narrative skills, and it is widely used for eliciting story retelling in preschool and young school-aged children.

⁴ The other FB measure, that is, the ULT, was not included in the FB latent factor since the answers to both false belief and control questions in this task were not correlated with the results of the UCT. For the sake of rigor and completeness, we also ran complementary analyses using an SEM model with the composite FB score (based on both UCT and ULT scores). The reported SEM model with the latent FB factor based on the UCT scores only and the SEM model with the composite FB score highlighted the same pattern of results.

⁵ As in the case with the model for pragmatics, only the UCT answers were used to create the FB latent factor, since the results of the ULT were not correlated with the results of the UCT. We also ran a complementary analysis to support the results of the reported model. The SEM model with a latent FB factor based on the UCT scores and the SEM model with the composite FB score (based on the both UCT and ULT scores) revealed the same results.

⁶ See also graphics illustrating the disappearing relationship between false belief and pragmatic scores on the OSF repository linked in the section Data availability statement.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya [2017 SGR_971,2020 FI_B2 00192]; Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades [PGC2018-097007-B-I00].