Keywords
linguistics
school-aged children
How to Cite
Abstract
During schooling, children's oral language skills increase quantitatively. Among the qualitative changes, the development of meta-pragmatic awareness -the ability to discriminate and to establish relationships between linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli -can be found. Despite the various hypotheses that attempt to account for this development, there is no empirical evidence that might explain these changes or specify the ages at which they appear. For the purpose of this article, a test was administered to 160 children between the ages of 6 and 12. The results suggest that as age increases, metapragmatic (conscious) responses increase and epipragmatic (automatic) responses decrease. Likewise, significant differences were found among the age groups, and their responses to the test items depended on the type of exercise, thus confirming that metapragmatic skills are not systematic; their effectiveness varies according to the relations between the linguistic message and the context.
This journal is registered under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Thus, this work may be reproduced, distributed, and publicly shared in digital format, as long as the names of the authors and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana are acknowledged. Others are allowed to quote, adapt, transform, auto-archive, republish, and create based on this material, for any purpose (even commercial ones), provided the authorship is duly acknowledged, a link to the original work is provided, and it is specified if changes have been made. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana does not hold the rights of published works and the authors are solely responsible for the contents of their works; they keep the moral, intellectual, privacy, and publicity rights. Approving the intervention of the work (review, copy-editing, translation, layout) and the following outreach, are granted through an use license and not through an assignment of rights. This means the journal and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana cannot be held responsible for any ethical malpractice by the authors. As a consequence of the protection granted by the use license, the journal is not required to publish recantations or modify information already published, unless the errata stems from the editorial management process. Publishing contents in this journal does not generate royalties for contributors.