ABSTRACT
The ability to comprehend and produce discourse, i.e ., sets of spoken or written utterances that are produced by one or more speakers and relate to a particular theme or set of themes, is a critical aspect of language development that has only recently begun to receive widespread theoretical and empirical treatment. Two factors have contributed to the growth of interest in how children process dis course. One is the discovery that an adequate account of language development cannot be formulated without relating children’s individual utterances to the context in which they occur, a context that includes both nonlinguistic factors (such as the objects present at the time of an utterance) and, of greater interest here, the preceding and following utterances made by the child or another partici pant in the discourse (cf. Bates, 1976; Bloom, Miller, & Hood, 1975; Dore, Gearhart, & Newman, 1978; Gleason & Weintraub, 1978; Shatz, 1975). The second factor is the development of more adequate theoretical analyses of dis course. Some of these analyses involve abilities and issues traditionally associ ated with language, e.g ., speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1975), analy ses of presuppositions (Kempson, 1975; Lakoff, 1971) and conversational postulates (Grice, 1975), and linguistic “ text grammars’’ (cf. Dressier, 1977; van Dijk, 1977b). Others have come from fields such as cognition and memory, which focus on abilities that fall outside the area of linguistic competence as traditionally defined, but have come to play an increasingly important role in analyses of language processing as it occurs in normal communicative contexts. Examples of the latter type of development are provided by analyses of cognitive schemata (e.g., scripts, story grammars, and plans) that are not necessarily restricted to linguistic applications but are thought to provide a basis for predict ing and organizing linguistic input and formulating linguistic output (cf. Fill
more, 1979; Johnson & Mandler, 1980; Lichtenstein & Brewer, 1980; Rumelhart, 1977; Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977; Schank & Abelson, 1977).
