Pragmatics is child’s play
Recent developmental research on social cognition indicates that pragmatics play a grounding role in the development of children's communicative skills even before they utter their first words. Much evidence in language acquisition also suggests that young children could not learn to speak without impressive pragmatic abilities. In stark contrast with this picture, linguistic pragmatic inferences (e.g., reference assignment, implicatures, metaphors, presuppositions and irony) appear to develop later than other linguistic abilities.
