CAREER: The Origins of Discourse: How Children Develop Communicative Rationality Across Three Diverse Societies

To become reasonable and responsible members of society, children have to acquire skills of citizenship. This proposal focuses on a key citizenship skill: how children learn to be proficient and critical contributors to public discourse. Research on how children acquire these essential skills is lacking. Rational discourse consists of two main skills: Reason-Responsiveness, the ability to form, maintain, or revise one’s beliefs appropriately in response to reasons provided by others; and Reason-Giving, the ability to provide adequate reasons supporting one’s own claims. The proposed project advances basic knowledge of the development of these two social critical thinking skills and reveals similarities and differences between children in these developmental processes. This project addresses the development of communicative rationality: how children between the ages of 4 and 9 develop fundamental skills to become proficient and critical contributors to public discourse. Using a mix of experimental and observational methods, the proposed research objectives focus on two key sets of psychological capacities: the development of reason-responsiveness and reason-giving. Additionally, the hypothesis that the development of communicative rationality can be fostered through a specific form of socio-linguistic interaction – parent-child metatalk – is tested. This research advances knowledge by i) developing a new perspective on rationality as a social phenomenon (communicative rationality) and further understanding of its development; ii) providing the first systematic test of how communicative rationality can be fostered in children; iii) revealing the influence of cultural factors on children’s developing communicative rationality. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.