¶ … Children's understanding of what is said and what is meant." The section begins with an explanation of grammatical and written competence development in young children. Because grammatical competence develops at a very early age, practically by imitation and intuition, many believe that this competence is an innate ability with which all children are born. Thus, when children enter school, they already have a considerable skill set in terms of spoken grammatical competence.
The text goes on to describe how written competence presents new demands for children, who need to now learn the structure of both spoken and written language consciously. Previously implicit knowledge is thus made conscious. As schooling develops, this conscious knowledge improves, as does the ability to interpret and to recognize interpretation. This however is a process that young children are unaware of, and thus find difficult to grasp. They have difficulty distinguishing between what is said and what is meant, as implied...
The further development of this is children's growing comprehension of false utterances, false beliefs, secrets and lies.
This understanding is built upon the distinction between verbatim repetition and paraphrase, and the consequent recognition of the possibility to misunderstand and come to a false belief as a result of what was said while something different was meant or implied. It is also shown that children are more sensitive to verbatim messages when these are presented in textual rather than spoken form. This is the first-order grasp of at the first order: and understanding of understanding. An understanding of interpretation - which is embedded in communicative intention - is acquired at the second order.
The last-mentioned is a…
