Comprehension of pragmatics of interrogatives in typically developing Tamil speaking children

Abstract

The present study investigated the development of comprehension contextually demanding interrogatives in Tamil for three pragmatic functions viz., reference assignment, enrichment and implicature Three hundred and fifteen typically developing children in the age range of five to nine years of age participated in this study. Each child was assessed individually using a Tamil material that was developed in this study. It consisted of pictorial short scenarios, stories and general conversation that had specific probe questions. The language samples were analyzed and percentage of correct responses was calculated for various types of questions In this study five to six year old children were able to meet 80 percentage criteria in answering correctly for reference assignment questions and the performance increased to 90 percentage by 8 to 9 years of age The enrichment questions were performed at 90 percentage level only by 8 to 9 year old children The implicature questions were performed at 73 percentage by the oldest group. Additionally the visual support aided children to direct their attention to the relevant part of the context The results indicated that as children grew older their ability to use complex contextual information in answering different types of questions also increased The percentage of correct responses for each question type was compiled to rank order the question types in Tamil The following ranking order of different question types were obtained ama or illa yes or no eand#331;ga where eppa when entha which jari who enna what eppand#598;i how and jen why Thus the present study yields a basic developmental trend about the ability to answer pragmatically demanding questions in typically developing Tamil speaking children Thus the results of this study on typically developing children provide an important data on the development of pragmatic comprehension of questions in Tamil speaking children In future, this material can be utilized in clinical assessment in children particularly with Autism and other semantic