La conciencia metapragmática en la edad escolar

Oral language skills develop in school age children both quantitatively and qualitatively. Among the qualitative changes, we find metapragmatic awareness. Despite the existence of various hypotheses which account for this development (Puyuelo y Rondal 2003), there is no empirical evidence for explaining these changes. With the purpose of describing the development of metapragmatic awareness, a test was administered to 160 children between the ages of 6 and 12. The results imply that as age increases, conscious (metapragmatic) responses increase, whereas automatic (epipragmatic) responses decrease. Likewise, significant differences were found among age groups, and their responses to the test items depended on the type of exercise, confirming thus that metapragmatic skills are not systematic.