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Communicative functions refer to the purpose of gestural, vocal, and verbal acts intended to convey information to others. Some communicative functions include commenting, requesting, protesting, directing attention, showing, and rejecting. Gestures and vocalizations are often first observed as an indication of intentionality in infants 8–9 months of age. It is at this point many infants appear to begin pursuing their intentions through interactions with others. The development of communicative functions has been described by Bates as occurring in a sequence of three stages: perlocutionary, illocutionary, and locutionary.
The perlocutionarystage of intentionality begins at birth and is expected to continue until approximately 8 months of age. During this period, the infant focuses on objects and people and attends, discriminates, and responds to stimuli through cries and coos. At this developmental level, the child...
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References and Readings
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bates, E. (1976). Language in context: Studies in the acquisition of pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.
Bates, E., Benigni, T., Bretherton, I., Camaioni, D., & Volterra, V. (1979). The emergence of symbols: Cognition and communication in infancy. New York: Academic Press.
Leonard, L. B., Camarata, S., Rowan, L. E., & Chapman, K. (1982). The communicative functions of lexical usage by language impaired children. Applied PsychoLinguistics, 3(02), 109–125.
Owens, R. E. (2008). Language development: An introduction (7th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Searle, J. (1965). What is a speech act? In M. Black (Ed.), Philosophy in America. New York: Allen & Unwin and Cornell University Press.
Wetherby, A. M. (1986). Ontogeny of communicative functions in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 16(3), 295–316.
Wetherby, A. M., Cain, D. H., Yonclas, D. G., & Walker, V. G. (1988). Analysis of intentional communication of normal children from the pre-linguistic to the multiword stage. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 31, 240–252.
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Austin, S. (2017). Communicative Functions. In: Volkmar, F. (eds) Encyclopedia of Autism Spectrum Disorders. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6435-8_964-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6435-8_964-3
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