Abstract
It remains unclear whether pragmatic language skills and core language skills (grammar and vocabulary) are distinct language domains. The present work aimed to tease apart these domains using a novel online assessment battery administered to almost 400 children aged 7 to 13 years. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that pragmatic and core language domains could be measured separately, but that both domains were highly related (r = .79). However, zero-order correlations between pragmatic tests were quite small, indicating that task-specific skills played an important role in performance, and follow-up exploratory factor analysis suggested that pragmatics might be best understood as a family of skills rather than a domain. This means that these different pragmatic skills may have different cognitive underpinnings and also need to be assessed separately. However, our overall results supported the idea that pragmatic and core aspects of language are closely related during development, with one area scaffolding development in the other.
Highlights
While vocabulary acquisition and grammatical skills are key to language development, they are not sufficient by themselves for understanding language
The item response theory (IRT) root mean square error of estimation (RMSEA) values indicate that a unidimensional model fitted each test at least adequately according to the criteria of .05 for ‘close fit’ and .089 for ‘adequate fit’ set out by Maydeu-Olivares and Joe (2014)
Our analysis supported a multifactorial view of language processing, as a one-factor model of language comprehension did not give a strong fit to data collected in almost 400 children aged 7 to 13 years
Summary
While vocabulary acquisition and grammatical skills are key to language development, they are not sufficient by themselves for understanding language. Alongside decoding processes (which include vocabulary and grammatical skills), language comprehension relies on pragmatic processing, whereby we produce an elaborate understanding of what the speaker intended to communicate in the context (Ariel, 2010). Relevance Theory is an influential model of communication that makes this distinction between decoding and pragmatics (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). It recognises that all uses of language involve some level of incompleteness or ambiguity, and we must use the broader communication context and the assumption that utterances are tailored relevantly to their context (i.e., the principle of optimal relevance) to infer the full extent of the speaker’s intended meaning.
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