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[Analysis of the pragmatic abilities profile in normal preschool children]
Simone de Rocha Vasconcellos Hage1, Marta Maria Resegue, Daniele Cristina Sedano de Viveiros
1Univeisidade de Navarra, Espanha. simonehage@uol.com.br
Insights
Preschool children primarily use verbal, coherent, and simple utterances, favoring informative functions. Children from private schools demonstrated superior pragmatic skills compared to those in public schools.
Area of Science:
- Child Development
- Linguistics
- Sociolinguistics
Context:
- Pragmatic abilities are crucial for effective communication in preschool children.
- Socioeconomic status can influence the development of these abilities.
- Understanding these differences is vital for early intervention and educational strategies.
Purpose:
- To profile the pragmatic abilities of preschool children.
- To investigate the impact of socioeconomic status on these abilities.
- To identify differences in pragmatic skills between children from public and private schools.
Summary:
- Children aged 36-47 months exhibited a preference for verbal, simple, and coherent utterances, with a tendency to respond rather than initiate conversations.
- The informative communicative function was most prevalent, though all functions were utilized by participants.
- Children attending private institutions showed significantly better performance in simple/expansive utterances and narrative function use compared to those in public schools.
Impact:
- Findings highlight that sociolinguistic factors, particularly socioeconomic level, can significantly affect children's pragmatic development.
- Results suggest a need for tailored educational approaches to support pragmatic skill acquisition across different socioeconomic backgrounds.
- This research provides valuable insights for speech-language pathologists and educators working with young children.
Background:
pragmatic abilities in children.
Aim:
to analyze the pragmatic abilities profile in normal preschool children and to verify if significant differences exist regarding the children's different socioeconomic levels.
Method:
participants of this study were 30 children, with ages between 36 and 47 months, who attended public and private elementary schools - low and medium/high socioeconomic levels respectively. A thirty minute semi-structured conversation between each child and the evaluator was recorded in VHS. For the analysis of the pragmatic abilities profile 20 minutes of each conversation was transcribed.
Results:
there is a prevalence of verbal over non-verbal and unintelligible utterances; simple over expansive utterances; coherent over incoherent utterances. There was a low occurrence of utterances used to start a conversation. Regarding the use of communicative functions, the informative function prevailed, even though all the others (instrumental, heuristic, naming, narrative, negative, interactive) were used by all of the children. Comparing the performance of children who attended public schools with that of children who attended private schools, statistically significant differences were observed in the number of simple and expansive verbal utterances, and in the use of the narrative function, indicating a better performance of children from private institutions.
Conclusion:
the analysis of the children's conversational abilities profile revealed that they respond/maintain the conversation instead of initiating it; their utterances are verbal, mostly coherent and simple. Regarding the communicative functions, the most prevalent was the informative function. Sociolinguistic aspects can interfere in the pragmatic abilities of children of different socioeconomic level.
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