Elicited and spontaneous communicative functions and stability of conversational measures with children who have pragmatic language impairments.

BACKGROUND The preliminary phase of a project aimed at establishing appropriate outcome measures for intervention with children who have pragmatic language impairments (PLI) is reported. Assessment methods for children with PLI are considered in the context of developing outcome measures for intervention studies. Communicative function assessments in elicitation and conversational contexts are compared. The stability of measures derived from conversational profiling is also considered. AIMS To investigate the utility of an elicited communicative function assessment in discriminating the pragmatic characteristics of children with PLI and to compare this method to conversational profiling. An additional aim was to estimate the degree of variation on conversational indices derived from interactions with children with PLI. METHODS & PROCEDURES Fifteen children with PLI (mean age 9; 5 years) and an age-matched control group were assessed on two occasions on a new communicative function elicitation task and on a conversation task. A checklist of communicative functions was employed in analysing the elicitation and the conversation tasks. An analysis of conversation was carried out to derive conversational indices such as verbosity and meshing. OUTCOMES & RESULTS The elicitation task failed to discriminate between the PLI and control groups and showed a strong ceiling effect. Significant between-group differences were found for both communicative function in conversation measures and on conversational indices. The variation in conversation indices is relatively small compared with the baseline measures. CONCLUSIONS A more representative picture of communicative function ability arises from unstructured tasks rather than from structured elicitation tasks for the age group of children with PLI. The elicitation procedure outlined in this paper might be better suited to a younger age group. Differences between communicative function performance on elicitation and conversation situations suggest a strong effect of context on the pragmatic performance of children with PLI. The conversational indices reported show sufficient stability to be employed in an outcome measure provided the minor variations indicated are factored into estimates of change.

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