Study on pragmatic assessment data reliability in children with typical language development

The aim of this study was to verify the moment with more reliable data to survey children's pragmatic profile. Participants were five children with typical language development and ages between 7 years and 1 month and 8 years and 11 months. Data collection involved a 150-minute recording of a child-researcher interaction, divided into five 30-minute individual sessions. Data were later analyzed according to a verbal communicative abilities protocol, and the individual pragmatic profiles of each 30-minute sample and the whole 150-minute sample were outlined for comparison (sessions 1 through 5 x overall total of sessions) of reliability indexes (RI) and reliability status (RS). Inter and intra-observer analyses were performed to calculate the RI and RS, respectively. The results presented by children 1 and 2 reached the larger RI in session 2; the child 3 showed similar RI values in sessions 3, 4 and 5; the child 4 had the largest RI in sessions 1 and 3; and the child 5 reached the same RI value in all sessions. Regarding the RS, session 2 presented the largest percentage of high reliability for most children, followed by session 3. On the analysis performed by category of verbal communicative abilities, session 3 presented the largest RS for dialogic and narrative-discursive abilities, and also for the overall total of verbal communicative abilities. In general, it was observed that sessions 2 and 3 allowed the largest RI and RS on the analysis performed to outline the children's pragmatic profile.