COMMENTARIES What would a theory of conversational awareness look like?

Siegal (e.g. 1991, Siegal & Peterson, 1994) has long argued that data from conversations with young children in experimental settings must be treated with caution. If the child does not understand and share the experimenter's purpose he or she may provide irrelevant responses ± irrelevant, that is, to the scientific endeavour of determining what the child knows. This is a valid methodological point, and indeed, Siegal's work over the past decade has helped to demonstrate its importance. The present contribution promises to go further, however. Siegal argues that children's interpretation of test questions is of more than merely methodological concern, such that there needs to be a `radical shift in cognitive developmental theory and research to account for the importance of children's conversational awareness' (p. 2). This is stirring stuff, and I read the paper with some anticipation. Unfortunately, however, Siegal fails to deliver. We learn again that young children are confused by violations of Gricean maxims and we are again provided with examples of their competence when test questions are used that do not require the interpretation of conversational implicatures. However, Siegal's theory of conversational awareness is never clearly spelled out. First, there is some confusion whether `conversational awareness' refers to children's pragmatic or metapragmatic ability. Siegal writes, `Piaget never defined conversation itself as a domain of knowledge even though how children understand the conversation initiated by experimenters is central to their performance on cognitive developmental tasks' (p. 2). `Understanding conversation' is pragmatics, whereas `conversation as a domain of knowledge' is metapragmatics. A theory of conversational awareness should, I would argue, include both but they need to be clearly distinguished. Children's pragmatic abilities begin very early in life. I disagree with Siegal's contention that our everyday conversations with young children do not violate Gricean maxims. Even very young children can respond to indirect requests and participate in teasing and jokes (Dunn, 1988). They will even respond to `known answer' questions when we want them to display their competence for admiring onlookers or in bookreading sessions. What young children lack is knowledge of the wider world, including the world of experimental psychology where people present tasks as `games' but none the less want serious answers to their questions. I agree that young children do not share the experimenter's purpose here but this is not a failure of their pragmatic ability. We would not expect them to share it. The skill in working with young children is to get the information we want from them without their sharing our purpose. This is where methodological expertise comes in. However, Siegal aims to go beyond methodological concerns in accounting for the importance of children's conversational awareness to their cognitive development. Although not specifically stated, the implication is that conversational awareness plays a fundamental causal role in conceptual change. This awareness appears to depend on children's awareness of their own and others' intentions and beliefs. A great deal of research in developmental psychology over the past two decades has been devoted to investigating the development of this understanding, under the rubric of `children's theory of mind'. It may be that Siegal's proposed `theory of conversational awareness' is meant to encompass a theory of the child's theory of mind. We need to know how it differs from other such theories and what its predictions are. Elsewhere (Siegal & Peterson, 1994), Siegal has said that children who have more experience of conversations perform better on false belief tests because of these experiences. But these conversations also provide children with the semantics of mental terms and the syntax of complementation ± both factors which others have argued are fundamental to false belief understanding (Astington, 1996; de Villiers & de Villiers, in