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Human communication involves much more than simple encoding and decoding procedures: it crucially involves contextually appropriate inferences. Grice (1975, 1989) has provided the most influential account to date of how inferences are derived in communication. He maintained that speakers implicitly follow a 'Cooperative Principle' that exhorts them to: 'Make your conversational contribution such as is required at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged' (Grice, 1989: 26-27). To communicate effectively, speakers conform to four types of conversational maxims that enjoin speakers to be no less informative (First Maxim of Quantity) or no more informative (Second Maxim of Quantity) than is required to communicate effectively, to avoid falsehoods (First Maxim of Quality) or to utter statements for which there is inadequate evidence (Second Maxim of Quality), to avoid obscurity, ambiguity and prolixity (Maxim of Manner), and to be relevant (Maxim of Relation). Another maxim discussed by Grice concerned the requirement to observe norms of politeness in conversational exchanges.
The Gricean view of communication has generated a number of investigations on processes of utterance interpretation, though few of these have been specifically with children (Noveck & Reboul, 2008; Siegal & Surian, 2004, 2007; Surian & Job, 1987). Deaf children of hearing parents are of particular interest because they lack early conversational experience in that they typically do not have access to a signed or spoken language until they come into contact with a community of deaf users of a sign language. As these children often perform poorly on Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks that involve understanding others' mental states (Siegal & Peterson, 2008), they may differ from typically developing children in their sensitivity to pragmatic constraints that involve the understanding of intended meaning in communication.
Considerable research has shown that hearing children and native signing children who from birth have had access to a sign language used by deaf family members outperform deaf children who have hearing parents and have gained access to a signed language later in school on tests of ToM reasoning (Courtin & Melot, 2005; Peterson & Siegal, 1998, 1999; Peterson, Wellman...