Social significance of tasks,routines, and pragmatic schemas in distribution activities

Past research on social marking and pragmatic reasoning schemas suggests that cognitive processing modes are first elaborated by children when they are carrying out regulating social routines in the course of which they learn to produce the responses that satisfy the demand of their environment. The data of the two experimental studies reported here with 4–5 year old children, for object distribution tasks, show that the social routines evoked by the objects to be processed have a dual effect, influencing both the representation of the partition to be made, as well as the procedures used to make them. It can be hypothesised that the utilization of routine-evoking tasks, which children are capable at a very young age, of accomplishing by activating efficient social-goal oriented procedures, promote the attribution of an operative meaning to the linguistic expressions used to characterize the states to be attained, and the transformations to be applied in order to attain them.