Pragmatic communicative competence in rehabilitated language-impaired preschool children.

[摘要] Aspects of communicative competence encompassingsyntactic, pragmatic and social skill dimensions wereexamined in preschool children. Subjects comprised fivelanguage-impaired children who had been declaredremediated after a period of language therapy(Age 5.0-6.5) and five children of the same ageconsidered to be linguistically normal. unstructuredmother/child interactions yielded language sampleswhich were analysed according to the LanguageAssessment Remediation and Screening procedure.Structured child/unfamiliar interlocutor dyadicinteractions were analysed in terms of the BehaviouralInventory of Speech Act Performances and according to adevised pragmatic addendum. Social skill profiles wereobtained by means of the Devereaux Elementary schoolBehaviour Rating Scale. No statistical differencesoccurred between groups on linguistic, pragmatic andsocial skill dimensions. Individual profiles of certainpresumably remediated subjects revealed ineffectivecommunicative modes in a structured dyadic context aswell as communicative deficits and behavioural problemsin the classroom situation.Significant correlations emerged among variouslinguistic pragmatic and social skill parameters.Theoretical and clinical implications of thesecorrelations and of deficits uncovered by particularmeasures in different contexts, are discussed.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand