The development of pragmatic communication skills in head injured children

Abstract

This study investigated the developmental levels of pragmatic language skills in children following head injury (HI), in comparison to their uninjured peers. Participants were 30 head-injured and 19 healthy controls, classified into a 'young' age group, 8-9 years, and an 'old' age group, 11-12 years. Participants were administered the WISC- III, a negotiating requests task and a hint task, the latter two assessing verbal reasoning skills and abilities to be indirect, respectively. It was found that negotiation and hinting strategies were rapidly developing in these age groups, where abilities to hint were less mature for all groups. Results found a main effect for injury on cognitive and functional language tasks, reflected by lower performance levels and inflexibility in reasoning for the head-injured group. Injury sustained at an earlier age consistently predicted poorer performance on the language tasks, complicating the ongoing development of generalized and higher-order communicative skills. Severity of injury did not predict performance on either language task.