ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the development of pragmatic competencies from a social and cross-cultural perspective. It presents some examples of cultural variations in pragmatic norms and discusses the implications of these cross-cultural differences for children's acquisition of social and cognitive pragmatic competencies. Differences of gender represent a dimension of social variation often studied in relation to the use of language, and a question for children's social development is whether girls and boys have different styles to express social hierarchies. The ethnographic approach to language acquisition includes a well-established research trend on language socialization, a term including "both socialization through language and to use language". Early studies of pragmatic socialization focused on the context of family interactions, and more specifically on relations between parents and their children. The chapter concludes that children develop cognitive pragmatic skills at a similar pace across cultures, despite differences of linguistic encoding in their exposure languages.
