Exploring Pragmatic and Linguistic Development Trends in Early Preschool Children

Purpose: It is proposed that pragmatic skills play an important role during the language development, in particular in social interactions with conversational partners. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between pragmatic and linguistic skills in a longitudinal perspective, assuming that social-conversational abilities at early stages are associated with the child’s linguistic development. Method: In a group of 7Italian children aged from 27 to 36 months, it was measured every three months (i.e., 28, 31 and 34 months) the assertiveness and responsiveness of children during the interactions with the adult via The Social Conversational Skills Rating Scale - Italian version and the vocabulary size, the M3LU and sentence complexity via MacArthur-Bates CDI. Individual profiles and communication development trajectories of the children are investigated. Further correlational analysis was performed to examine the relation between pragmatic aspects and linguistic abilities. Results: Analysis showed significant differences in the developmental trajectories of each subject. Comparisons of social-conversational variables with linguistic skills point out positive correlations across the three observation times. Conclusion: Despite the sample is too small to draw definitive conclusions, these results suggest the importance of pragmatic assessment in language evaluation; however further researches are necessary to confirm these results.