Language in Context: History, Developmental Milestones, and Implications for Intervention

Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences
Wichita State University

Introduction:

The ability to communicate is fostered and mastered through natural interactions in our world. We develop effective communication skills by engaging in conversations. Conversational skills become the centerpiece for communication development. When we engage in conversation, pragmatic skills are used.

Among the many skills that encompass pragmatics, the conversational abilities of turn taking and topic initiation and maintenance are essential for discourse. Children with language impairments often do not follow typical developmental paths with respect to pragmatic abilities.

Research in typical and atypical pragmatic skills can be used to guide speech language pathologists (SLPs) to facilitate a strong link between what is known about language in context, to what is used in treatment protocols. SLPs should consider eliminating strategies with no realistic carryover to the real world. Language as a social tool, should be approached in a manner consistent with the everyday communicative environment.

Pragmatics:

Pragmatics is the study of language in context (McTear, 1985). Linguists generally agree that pragmatics is the overall organizing principle of language, including a set of rules, functions, purposes or intents within the communicative context (Hulit & Howard, 2002; Owens, 2001). In pragmatics, the emphasis is on the way language is used for communication, rather than the way language is structured. We make use of pragmatic skills when we engage in conversation.

The analysis of conversation has roots in several disciplines: philosophy, psychology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology and speech-language pathology. According to Bates (1976), pragmatics originated in 1932 with philosopher Charles Peirce, when he developed his theory of 'semiotics.' Probably the most widely cited early definition is that of Charles Morris (1946) who divided linguistic science into syntactics (the relations among signs), semantics (the relations among signs and referents) and pragmatics (the relations among signs and their users).

The study of language in context did not gain recognition until the 1970s. Prior to that time, child language research focused on linguistically relevant knowledge, influenced by Chomsky's (1957) transformational grammar. A shift in emphasis began in the 1960s with contributions from Austin (1962) and his student Searle (1969), who originated 'speech act theory,' focusing on the instrumental aspects of communication. Hymes (1962) and Slobin (1967) voiced objections to the preoccupation with a purely syntactic conceptualization of linguistic competence. They believed linguistic competence represented only one component of what a language user must know to be competent with language.

In the early 1970s the focus on language shifted to relational semantics. Bloom (1970), Schlesinger (1971), and Brown (1973) studied children's language at the two-word stage and devised lists of semantic relations. This period acknowledged the necessity of looking at events embracing the utterances to classify those utterances.