In developing a test of pragmatic skills for children ages 4 to 9 years, we focused
on a number of functional language skills that are important for children's success
in early schooling and for the development of fluent reading and writing. They included
(1) wh-question asking, (2) communicative role taking, (3) linking events in a cohesive
narrative, and (4) articulating the mental states of the characters in a story. All
of the proposed items provide specific referential support and pragmatic motivation
for the forms and content to be produced by the child. The pictured materials and
elicitation prompts constrain the range of appropriate utterances, so the children's
productions are more easily scored than an open-ended spontaneous speech sample. All
tasks described show a clear developmental trend, a clear separation between the performance
of typically developing and language-impaired children, and no performance differences
between African American English- and Mainstream American English-speaking children.
KEYWORDS
Communicative roles - question asking - cohesive narrative - theory of mind - mental
states - perspective taking - language functions - pragmatics
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Peter A de VilliersPh.D.
Professor of Psychology, Smith College, Northampton
Amherst, MA 01003
eMail: pdevilli@smith.edu
