Communicative abilities in children: An assessment through different phenomena and expressive means *

Previous studies on children’s pragmatic abilities have tended to focus on just one pragmatic phenomenon and one expressive means at a time, mainly concentrating on comprehension, and overlooking the production side. We assessed both comprehension and production in relation to several pragmatic phenomena (simple and complex standard communication acts, irony, and deceit) and several expressive means (linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic). Our study involved 390 Italian-speaking children divided into three age groups: 5;0–5;6, 6;6–7;0, and 8;0–8;6. Children’s performance on all tasks improved [*] This research was supported by Regione Piemonte, Project : Institutions, Behavior and Markets in Local and Global Settings (Project IIINBEMA). J. Child Lang. 40 (2013), 741–778. f Cambridge University Press 2013 doi:10.1017/S0305000913000081