The Developmental Characteristics Of 7-9 Year-Old Children’s Understanding Of Faux Pas In Different Communicative Situations

The classical research paradigm used in the previous research were not close to people’s daily life and they are not suitable for studying the old children’s To M level. In the context of the recognition of the life-span perspective, the researchers proposed faux pas comprehension task. It can also be called faux pas detection task or faux pas recognition task. This task has many advantages. It is closer to the real life and it can investigate Children’s understanding of a variety of psychological states. At present,There are few researches on the faux pas detection task in which the subjects comprehended the listeners’ and speakers’ different psychological states In real life, Faux pas situation appears more in self-other situation. In the self-other situation, self may be the faux pas listener or the faux pas speaker. The change of communicative roles(listener, speaker and the third party) may probabaly influence, the level of children’s faux pas understanding. In addition,real communicative situations invovle different roles,therefore,does the communicative role influence children’s faux pas understanding?This research studied the influence of communicative situation on the understanding of 7-9 year-old children’s faux pas level. The research can be divided into two parts. The first part was conducted in 257 children aged 7 to 9, using story situational method, to investigate their developmental features of the faux pas understanding in different communicative roles. The second one was conducted in children chosed from the first part whose task scores are no less than 3 and no more than 15, to study the developmental features of the faux pas understanding when facing different communicative objects in two different communicative roles, using story situational method. The conclusions are below:Firstly, children’s faux pas understanding level grows with their age, and develops rapidly after the age of eight. And there is no gender difference.Secondly, in faux pas understanding, children’s developmental level differs in faux pas recognition, emotion understanding and intention understanding. The level of intention understanding is the lowest.Thirdly, the communicative role has more effect on the faux pas understanding of seven-year old children than that of eight or night year-old children.That is to say, in the development of the faux pas understanding, the degree of situation dependence in the early stage is stronger than in the middle and later stages.Lastly, the faux pas understanding of seven to nine year-old children is influenced by the communicative object. When the communicator is a teacher, children’s score is the highest. When the communicator is the peer, children’s score is the lowest.