The identification and classification of implicit speech acts among Chinese children in middle childhood

Despite the numerous studies on the perception of speech acts, very little is known about how children in middle childhood perceive implicit speech acts (ISA) across different ages. To this end, referring to the research paradigm described by Holtgraves (2005, 2008), this experimental study aimed to examine the identification and classification of utterances with implicit performatives among 621 Chinese children between the age of 9-13. The results indicate that on the identification task, 11- and 12-year-olds significantly outperformed 9-year-olds, and girls identified more implicit speech acts than boys. Most importantly, similar to adults, 13-year-olds categorized implicit speech acts based on the emotional valence of listeners, while 11-year-olds tended to group them according to the psychological states and attitudes of the speakers. However, 9-year-olds were not able to classify implicit speech acts. The above findings offer valuable implications for pragmatic teaching and research.