Stockholm university
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David PagmarResearcher

About me

My reseach concerns the development of pragmatic competence and its connection to other linguistic abilities. In general terms, I'm interested in how people learn to use their first langugae.

     Pragmatic competence is a general term for a wide set of different abilities, e.g. providing sufficient information, avoiding irrelevant information, making inferences based on what others say, being timely in conversation, etc.

     When a language user utilizes their pragmatic competence, they are acting in agreement with a set of asumptions about how one can, and should, communicate.

Research projects

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Frequency, Form, and Distribution of Illocutionary Speech Acts in Swedish Parent-Child Interaction

    2016. David Pagmar, Tove Gerholm, Bernhard Wälchli.

    In this study, young children’s development of speech acts was examined. Interaction between six Swedish-speaking parents and their children was observed. The frequency, form and distribution of speech acts in the output from the parents were compared with the frequency, form and distribution of the children’s speech acts. The frequency was measured by occurrences per analysed session. The aim of the analysis was to examine if the parent’s behaviour could be treated as a baseline for the child’s development. Both the parents’ and the children’s illocutionary speech acts were classified. Each parent-child dyad was observed at four different occasions, when the children were 1;0, 1;6, 2;0, and 2;6 years of age. Similar studies have previously shown that parents keep a consistent frequency of speech acts within a given time span of interaction, though the distribution of different types of speech acts may shift, depending on contextual factors. The form, in terms of Mean Length of Speech Act in Words (MLSAw), were correlated with the longitudinal result of the children’s MLSAw. The distribution of the parents’ speech acts showed extensive individual differences. The result showed that the children’s MLSAw move significantly closer the MLSAw of their parents. Since the parent’s MLSAw showed a wide distribution, these results indicate that the parent’s speech acts can be treated as a baseline for certain aspects of the children’s development, though further studies are needed.

    Read more about Frequency, Form, and Distribution of Illocutionary Speech Acts in Swedish Parent-Child Interaction

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