Communication theme

How do children learn to use language structure to communicate effectively?

Theme Lead: Prof Anna Theakston, The University of Manchester

Children need to learn not only the sentence structures of their language, but also how to use them effectively. This theme explores how children learn different language structures, and how their use is affected by social understanding.

There are four research projects under this theme:

• How do children’s linguistic and socio-cognitive skills interact with language input in learning modal and mental state terms?
• The acquisition of tag questions
• The comprehension and production of restrictive relative clauses
• Acquiring complex sentences

Impact

Work under this theme will enable us to:

• Provide detailed information on how children learn form-function mappings to signal different communicative goals
• Advise practitioners on the best contexts for learning complex social language.