Conversational categories and metapragmatic awareness in typically developing children

The purpose of the present study is to examine the developmental route of conversation rules awareness and its violation in 4–10-year olds typically developing children, to identify age-matched developmental sequences and identify variables that influence this pragmatic developmental component. Evidence of adequate pragmatic functioning can be found in preschool children. However, only at older ages (before and during school) children exhibit a higher awareness of conversational rules and exhibit a metapragmatic ability to explicitly reflect knowledge of pragmatic behaviors and laws during a conversation (Collins et al., 2014). Metapragmatic awareness of conversational rules violations was examined in 75 typically developing children using seven short video conversations between children, including two conversational categories (Turn-taking mechanism and Dialogue cooperation), followed by four explicitly ascending metapragmatic questions. A positive correlation between age and performance in the metapragmatic awareness task was found. Furthermore, the metapragmatic performance was better in all age groups for Turn-taking mechanism category videos over Dialogue cooperation skills category. Finally, two different developmental trajectories trends were observed regarding the conversational categories. The current study supports the idea that awareness of both categories is age-dependent and highlights the importance of the different effect conversational categories have. We suggest that these categories presumably have a different developmental route in typically developing children and offer possible explanations.