The evaluation of pragmatic difficulties. A case study

Pragmatic skills are defined as the speaker's appropriate use of language to communicate in different contexts and with different interlocutors. Within the field of disorders affecting language and communication, research into this issue became particularly important when, in 1983, Rapin and Allen put forward the term semantic pragmatic disorder to describe the communicative behaviour of children who presented traits such as pathological talkativeness, deficient access to vocabulary and discourse comprehension, atypical choice of terms and inappropriate conversational skills. This pioneering proposal has led to a development from both a terminological perspective and as regards the entity itself and the differential validity of the disorder. In this work, our aim is to bring together the main procedures used to evaluate pragmatic skills in children; this will be illustrated with examples taken from our own clinical practice and experience involving children belonging to different clinical groups. These procedures include getting people who play significant roles in the child's life to answer scales and surveys, the use of standardised instruments and other tasks, and finally the qualitative analysis of their discourse and conversation.