The Identification and Classification of Implicit Speech Acts among Chinese Children in the Middle Childhood

This study selected Chinese school-age children from 7-year-old to 13-year-old to investigate the characteristics of children’s speech act identification and classification ability. The study population was selected in a primary and a secondary school in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China. First of all, a pilot experiment has been conducted to compile the corpus that is applicable to children. After that, the identification task, sorting task and rating task was conducted to evaluate the developmental trajectory of Chinese children's perception ability on speech act.