Study title

For children's wellbeing and educational success, it is essential that they develop their language and communication abilities. The goal of this fellowship was to advance knowledge of one facet of this issue how kids develop practical skills and put that knowledge into action. This archive contains files containing data, methods descriptions and analysis scripts from: 1. semi-structured interviews with UK primary school teachers about their experience of teaching inferencing in the classroom 2. an online psycholinguistic experiment, conducted as a follow-up to studies investigating the role of visual perspective-taking in pragmatic inferences.The development of language and communication skills is crucial for children's wellbeing and education outcomes. This Fellowship is about improving understanding of one aspect of this - how children learn pragmatic skills - and applying this understanding to practice. When we communicate, we often mean far more than we say; this may be obvious when we are ironic, for example, but happens in more subtle ways in most instances of communication. This means that we are constantly making inferences about what the speaker means. These pragmatic skills are bound up with social, emotional and cognitive learning in children's development. In my doctoral research, I empirically investigated a particular type of pragmatic inference, known as an 'implicature'. For instance, if in answer to the question, 'did you meet his parents?', the speaker says, 'I met his mum', then the hearer infers that the speaker met only his mum (not his dad), by assuming that the speaker is fully informative; but if the question were 'why are you upset?', then the inferred meaning would be quite different. I found that children are able to make these kind of implicature inferences at a younger age than often previously thought, from about 3 years, but, crucially, that children only have this competence in simple communicative situations, where the...