ABSTRACT
The skills involved in argument as a social discourse activity presumably develop during the childhood and adolescent years, but little is known about the course of that development. A comparison of the dialogues of young adolescents and those of young adults showed the teens to be more preoccupied with producing the dialogue and less able to behave strategically with respect to the goals of argumentive discourse. Teens also did not exhibit the strategic skill that adults did of adapting discourse to the requirements of particular argumentive contexts. The advantage of a discourse-based model is that it acknowledges the role of social interaction in the construction of argument. The goal of critical dialogue is to draw one's own conclusion from a partner's commitments; that is, each participant in the dialogue must get the partner to accept certain premises. The empirical data reported are based on transcriptions of a series of dyadic discussions on the topic of capital punishment (CP).
