Transgressing the communicative contract

A testing situation constitutes a social episode in which a series of tacit rules (or "contract") regulates communicative exchanges between interlocutors, contributing to the establishment of an intersubjectivity. This poster presents three studies which examined the dysfunctioning of the communicative contract in a testing situation in order to observe the existence of these interactional norms. Children (aged 4-5 and 11-12 years) were placed in different interactive contexts where the adult deliberately transgressed the communicative contract (by cheating or by presenting the child with a meaningless task). Quantitative and qualitative analyses of subjects' behaviors suggest that children's responses in testing situations are indissociable from the conditions of their production.