A growing body of developmental evidence suggests that the cognitive abilities that enable the expression and comprehension of communicative intentions – so-called pragmatic abilities – which underlie language use and understanding, develop early. However, a puzzling feature of pragmatic development is children's difficulties with non-literal uses of language (e.g., ‘I love you so much I could eat you up!’). I outline a research program that aims to provide input to a novel theoretical account of pragmatic development that resolves this developmental puzzle. Rather than investigating different types of non-literal language use in isolation, we should adopt a global perspective on children's pragmatic difficulties. On the basis of experimental evidence from children's comprehension of metonymy and irony, I hypothesise that children's growing sensitivity to sense conventions impedes their pragmatic reasoning with non-literal uses during the preschool years. According to this hypothesis, children's ‘literalism’ does not result from poor pragmatic abilities, but arises because attending to conventions – and to sense conventions in particular - serves an important function at a particular stage of language and social learning. The aim is to open a new direction for empirical research into the development of non-literal uses of language, and pragmatic development more generally.

越来越多的发展证据表明，能够表达和理解交际意图的认知能力——所谓的语用能力——是语言使用和理解的基础，发展得很早。然而，语用发展的一个令人费解的特征是儿童在非字面使用语言方面的困难（例如，“我非常爱你，我可以把你吃掉！'）。我概述了一个研究计划，旨在为解决这个发展难题的实用发展的新理论解释提供输入。与其孤立地研究不同类型的非文字语言使用，我们应该对儿童的语用困难采取全球视角。根据儿童对转喻和反讽的理解的实验证据，我假设儿童对感官习惯的日益敏感阻碍了他们在学龄前阶段进行非文字使用的语用推理。根据这个假设，儿童的“文字主义”不是由于实用能力差，而是因为注意惯例——以及感知惯例特别是 - 在语言和社会学习的特定阶段发挥重要作用。目的是为实证研究开辟一个新的方向，研究语言的非文字用途的发展，以及更普遍的语用发展。