Social-pragmatic contextual comprehension in Italian preschool and school-aged children: a study using the Pragma test

Abstract

Efficient communication requires the interplay of linguistic, cognitive and social skills, including the ability to make contextual inferences and to understand others’ intentions and emotions. The capacity to effectively use language in specific contexts (i.e., pragmatic ability) develops with age, and an assessment of this ability is important for understanding both typical and atypical development. The Pragma test was originally developed and validated on Finnish children to assess social-pragmatic comprehension. The present study utilizes a slightly adapted version of the Pragma test, translated into Italian, and presents the results of the test given to 110 typically developing Italian children (4–8 years of age). The Italian version of the Pragma test shows content and concurrent validity, interrater reliability, and internal consistency, and it proves to be sensitive in detecting an age-dependent pattern of performance, across pre-school and school age children, in the pragmatic parameters investigated. The present study has ramifications for clinical contexts, as data for typical pragmatic development enables identification of strengths and weaknesses in the pragmatic performance in clinical populations. Finally, the results indicate that the Pragma test is relevant to both Finnish and Italian cultural contexts, thus providing the opportunity to make cross-cultural comparisons.

Silent Finns and Talkative Italians? An investigation of communicative differences and similarities as perceived by parents in typically developing children

“…The effect of age on the communicative ability is well known in the literature, and such effect seems particularly relevant in preschool and school years as shown by a number of studies (see, for example, Bosco et al, 2013;Bosco & Gabbatore, 2017a;Loukusa et al, 2017;Ryder & Leinonen, 2003). The results of the present study suggest that the effect of age on communicative performance seems to be independent of the effect of nationality, and yields a linear trend in scores with age, observable in both the Finnish and the Italian samples, in line with previous studies (see, for example, Gabbatore et al, 2021) showing a similar trend in children of different nationalities. Nevertheless, this does not rule out the presence of differences that may have to do with the particular cultural context of each child.…”

“…The present study highlights, in line with some other recent research (e.g. Gabbatore et al, 2019Gabbatore et al, , 2021Huttunen et al, 2013;Mäkinen et al, 2020), how aspects of communicative ability may be culture-or language-specific. What is considered as appropriate in one particular cultural context might not be so in another culture (Küntay et al, 2014;Stivers et al, 2009).…”

“…It is noteworthy that the present data are aligned with recent studies using standardized formal assessment tools. Gabbatore et al (2021) examined psychometric properties of the Pragma Test (Loukusa et al, 2017) in Italian preschool and school children, and showed that pragmatic ability examined by the Pragma test displayed similar age effects in Italian and Finnish contexts; this demonstrated that the Pragma Test is sensitive to detecting a differentiated development of the different pragmatic abilities investigated across its tasks, thus being a useful tool in both cultural contexts. Nevertheless, the authors also detected slightly lower mean scores – indicating here lower performance – in the Pragma tasks obtained by the Italian children when compared to those of Finnish children of same age groups (Loukusa et al, 2017), a pattern of results that is aligned with the outcome of the present study.…”

“…Nevertheless, the authors also detected slightly lower mean scores – indicating here lower performance – in the Pragma tasks obtained by the Italian children when compared to those of Finnish children of same age groups (Loukusa et al, 2017), a pattern of results that is aligned with the outcome of the present study. Interestingly, Gabbatore et al (2021) used the CCC-2 (Bishop, 2003) as a concurrent validity measure, finding a correlation with the Pragma Test scores. With this in mind, lack of complementary assessment methods could be seen as a limitation of the present study, as looking at children’s pragmatic performance from different perspectives (i.e.…”

“…Very few assessment instruments are available for different languages (see, for example, Gabbatore et al, 2019), which would allow for direct comparison of individuals from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Gabbatore et al (2021) examined psychometric properties of the Pragma Test (Loukusa et al, 2017), an assessment tool originally developed in Finland to assess children’s social-pragmatic comprehension, in Italian children from 4 to 8 years of age, and qualitatively compared the scores with those obtained with the same tool by a homologous Finnish sample (Loukusa et al, 2017). A similar developmental trend was detected in the Italian and Finnish contexts, with slightly lower mean scores obtained by the Italian children as compared to the Finnish children.…”