Assessment of Pragmatic Language Skills in Children

Pragmatic Language taps aspects of human communication which varies in accordance to the situation. As there is a lack of awareness on what exactly are Pragmatic Language Skills, thorough literature is presented on the nature of language skills and the measures that have been used to assess these skills. The purpose of this research is to bring light to this aspect and to construct a new Pragmatic Language task in Hindi in order to accurately tap several of its markers in Indian children of the age group 5 to 10 years focusing on eliciting the communication skills that they use in everyday context. The task we constructed in contrast to the previous tools conducts interviews directly with the targeted child involving the use of specifically designed test which focus on two components, Judgment and Expression. Narration of Hindi stories and on that basis asking questions help in the elicitation of specific culture friendly pragmatics marker that are relevant to children in the 5-to-10-year age group belonging to Indian families of urban middle class households. These markers are categorised in a checklist and based on their performance children are ranked. First order and second order Theory of Mind test was used with pictures and narration of false belief stories along with that parent/teacher report was collected by a well validated and reliable scale, Pragmatic Abilities Questionnaire by Jafari et al. (2019) to ascertain positive correlation with the newly developed task and stablish concurrent validity. Face Validity was stabilised by subject matter experts and Inter-rater reliability was defined. The task proved to a good measure for assessing Pragmatic Language skills. The implications of this research are in the development of the social language intervention programs and will make a significant contribution in benefiting the population with atypical development.