Connections of child language development, joint attention and metapragmatic awareness

Dr. Ágnes Hámori, colleague to the Research Centre for Multilingualism, gave a plenary lecture on the 24th of May 2018 at the conference titled “The process of mother tongue acquisition after the age of 3” organized at Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities. The title of the lecture was “Pragmatic competence and metapragmatic awareness of six-year-old children”, and dealt with linguistic awareness and metalinguistic reflections of children and their correlations to social play, conversations and joint attention, within the framework of the MTA-NYTI Languag-E-Chance Educational Research Group. The study of the connections between metalinguistic reflections, conversations, awareness and the joint attention is also important as basic research, but the lecture has also made important and directly applicable statements for kindergarten and school education, for the teachers, parents and special education teachers – with an audience of numerous interested: linguists, teachers and special education teachers.