ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the study which explores the consequences of early literate experience and knowledge for preschooler's speech act comprehension strategies. The first study asked whether any effect of early literacy would interact with the specific linguistic domain manipulated, namely segmental phonology and all that it conveys in train for comprehension of pragmatic intention. Developed to forego the interview process when working with large samples, the Home Literacy Environment Index (HLEI) is a 16 item questionnaire designed to elicit information regarding the literacy environment and interaction with literacy materials in the home. The second study considered a somewhat more discrete linguistic parameter, syntactic well-formedness, as a means of detecting the shift from context-based to text-based speech act comprehension strategies. The third linguistic parameter explored was that of semantic appropriateness. The study asked whether the distinction between text-based and context-based pragmatic comprehension strategies would be detected at the level of semantic-referential 'fit' between an utterance and its extralinguistic context.
