Literal meaning and context categories in the attribution of communicative intentions: A developmental study

Studies in developmental literature claim that for young children context plays a more important role than literal meaning in comprehending a speaker's communicative intention. The present study evaluates this claim for different categories of context in children aged 3 to 7 years. In particular, we analyze contexts pertaining to the categories we define as follows: Access, Space, Time, Discourse, Extra-linguistic-behavior and Status. The results of the study show that, for all children, the contexts investigated within the categories Space, Time and Status play a more important role than literal meaning and that, on the contrary, the literal meaning bears a more weight than the context within the category Discourse. We discuss the results in terms of different roles played in different contexts in the reconstruction of a speaker’s communicative intention in children of different ages.