ABSTRACT
Researchers from a wide variety of fields have become increasingly concerned with the study of children's communicative competencies. The extant literature has generally reflected two approaches. The first, which may be labeled the cognitive developmental approach, has focused on communicative competence as an index of such intellectual growth markers as egocentrism, sociocentrism, or decentration. The second approach, developmental pragmatics, represents a turn away from the more traditional study of the syntactic and semantic aspects of language and a move toward the more practical consideration of how children use words to communicate. A major reason for the citation of Piaget's early work on communicative development stems from his unique proposition that much of children's early verbalization is not adapted to the requirements of their listeners. The developmental study of children's speech acts is a fairly recent phenomenon and it borrows heavily from Austin's three-way classification system of discourse. Researchers have recently inferred the existence of perspective-taking skills from examinations of discourse.
