Early stages of trilingual pragmatic development. A longitudinal

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Early stages of trilingual pragmatic development. A longitudinal study of requests in Catalan, Spanish and English Maria-Pilar Safont-Jordà * English Studies Department, Universitat Jaume I, Avgda. Sos Baynat s/n, 12071 Castello ́ , Spain Received 30 October 2012; received in revised form 16 January 2013; accepted 19 January 2013 Abstract The present paper deals with the requestive development of a consecutive trilingual boy from ages 3.6 to 5.6. To the best of our knowledge, no previous study has accounted for the requestive development (i.e. use of directives) of successive trilinguals in early childhood. Yet, in previous analyses of our data involving years 2.6--3.6, we identified an increase in the use of conventionally indirect forms and a decrease in the production of direct request types coinciding with the introduction of a third language. On account of our results, we wondered whether the act of requesting would evolve differen...