Assessing Language Pragmatics: Who, What and How

1. Assessing Language Pragmatics: Who, What and How Peter A. de Villiers Jill G. de Villiers Smith College *supported by NIH grant N01-DC-8-2104 to the University of Massachusetts and Smith College *webpage: www.umass.edu/aae

2. Pragmatics • The functional use of language between speaker(s) and listener(s) for effective communication. • Syntax and semantics are always intertwined with their functional use in communication so cannot be totally separated from pragmatics skills in language acquisition. • Looking at the development or impairment of “communicative competence” (Hymes, 1972). • We will focus on pragmatic language (not gesture or other non-verbal communication) between the ages of 3 and 9.

3. Who needs to be assessed? • Some children show differential impairment of the functional and social-interactional components of language • Children with autistic spectrum disorders • Children with Asperger syndrome • Children with specific Pragmatic Language Impairment (Bishop, 1998) • But most children with substantial language impairment will also show pragmatic problems • Especially if they have both receptive and expressive language impairment (Craig & Evans, 1993)

4. What to assess? Five Components of Pragmatics

5. Conversational skills in social interaction • Speech Acts -- doing things with words and utterances • Reference and Presuppositions taking into account the perspective or knowledge state of the listener • Extended discourse genres: e.g., Narrative, Exposition • Styles or “registers”of speaking

6. 1. Conversational Skills • Turn taking • Sensitivity to non-linguistic, paralinguistic, and linguistic cues • Topics • Initiation • Maintenance • Elaboration • Ending • Change

7. Grice’s Conversational Maxims - Cooperative Principles • Sincerity • Assumption that speaker means what she says • Relevance • Keeping on topic • Quantity • Providing enough but not too much redundant information for the listener

8. 2. Speech Acts • Doing things with words and utterances • Informing or reporting • Requesting information • Requesting action (indirect questions) • Commanding or demanding • Denying statements • Rejecting or prohibiting actions • Greetings

9. 3. Referential Specificity, Continuity, and Presuppositions • Assessing what your listener knows or needs to know • Shared information from the referential context or world knowledge • Shared information already introduced into the discourse • Coherence and Cohesion in discourse • Linking utterances together thematically, temporally and referentially

10. Conversational Breakdowns and Repairs • Detecting communication breakdown and its source • Contingent queries and requests for clarification • Spontaneous and prompted repairs • Repetition • Further specification • Elaboration • Confirmation

11. 4. Extended Discourse Genres - Narratives • Coherence in narratives • Plot and episode structure • Story grammars • Cohesion in narratives • Reference • Introducing, maintaining, and specifying characters • Linking events • Causal links • Temporal links • Mental states and the “Landscape of Consciousness” (Bruner, 1986)

12. 5. Speaking with Style - Speech Registers • Tailoring one’s speech to the audience and social situation e.g. politeness, baby talk etc. • Age of listener • Social status of listener • Formality of the situation • Cultural expectations

13. How to Assess Some existing procedures

14. How to assess1. Conversational Skills a) Language sampling • Closer to authentic communication • But needs to be structured to get some features • Time consuming and labor intensive • Often lack measures of reliability, validity, and norms b) Conversational Analysis • (Craig & Evans, 1993) c) Pragmatic Profiles • (Prutting & Kirchner, 1987). d) Checklists by teachers, clinicians, or parents • Children’s Communication Checklist (Bishop, 1998).

15. b) Conversational Analysis • Craig & Evans (1993) • Analyzed children’s adjacent responses to adult utterances as contingent vs noncontingent • Cohesion ties with prior adult utterance as complete vs incomplete. • Complete ties of various sorts (e.g., lexical, referential (e.g. pronouns), ellipsis, connectives) • SLI children with receptive as well as expressive problems were: • Lacking in strategies for conversational interruption and access • Made fewer connective ties to previous adult utterance • Made more incomplete ties to adult’s utterances

16. c) Pragmatic Profile (Prutting & Kirchner, 1987) • Age 5 and up. • Based on 15 minute spontaneous, unstructured conversation sample with a familiar partner. • 30 pragmatic features rated as appropriate (facilitate or neutral with respect to communication) or inappropriate (get in the way of communicative exchange) [or no opportunity to observe] • 18 Verbal aspects of communication: • Speech acts (pairs and variety) • Topic (selection, introduction, maintenance, change) • Turn taking (initiation, response, repair, adjacency, contingency, quantity) • Lexical selection (specificity/accuracy, cohesion) • Stylistic variation • 5 Paralinguistic aspects (intelligibility and prosodics) • 7 Nonverbal aspects (e.g, physical proximity, gestures, eyegaze)

17. Pragmatic Profile (Prutting & Kirchner, 1987) • Compared 42 typically developing with 42 language disordered and 42 articulation disordered children between the ages of 7 and 10. • Language disordered children were most likely to be flagged as inappropriate in turn-taking repair, turn-taking quantity, specificity/accuracy of lexical selection, and cohesion ties to the prior utterance. • Articulation disordered children did not show these problems but were more likely to be flagged for paralinguistic aspects.

18. d)Children’s Conversational Checklist (Bishop,1998) • 70 items scored as “does not apply” (0), “applies somewhat” (1), and “definitely applies” (2). • Some items scored as positive (+), most as negative (-). • Items fall into 9 categories: • A. Speech intelligibility and fluency • B. Syntax • C. Inappropriate initiation • D. Coherence • E. Stereotyped conversation • F. Use of conversational context • G. Conversational rapport • H. Social relationships • I. Interests • So 5 categories involve Pragmatic Language (38 items)

19. Children’s Conversational Checklist Some example items: • C. Inappropriate initiation • Talks too much • Keeps telling people things they know already • D. Coherence • Has difficulty telling a story, or describing what he has done, in an orderly sequence of events • Uses terms like “he” and “it” without making clear what he is talking about

20. Children’s Conversational Checklist (cont) • E. Stereotyped conversation • Will suddenly change the topic of conversation • Has favorite phrases and sentences which he will use a great deal, sometimes inappropriately • F. Use of conversational context • Tends to be over literal (e.g., “watch your hands”) • May say things which are tactless or socially inappropriate • G. Conversational rapport • Ignores conversational overtures from others • Seldom or never looks at the person he is talking to

21. Children’s Conversational Checklist • Fairly good clinician inter-rater reliability and internal consistency -- in the .80 range. • Pragmatic composite score (the 38 items) discriminates significantly between autistic, pragmatic language impaired (without autism), other SLI, and typically developing children. • Low correlations between teacher/clinician ratings and parent ratings (+.48 on pragmatic composite score)

22. Summary of Conversational Assessment • The pragmatic problems of autistic spectrum and pragmatic language impaired children seem to lie fundamentally in the Gricean conversational principles that depend on mutuality of communication (and theory of mind) -- turn taking, topic and referential continuity and relevance, assessing listeners state of knowledge or ignorance etc. • The pragmatic problems of SLI children without any social-cognitive impairments seem to lie at the interface of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Limitations in syntactic and lexical understanding and expression impair the linguistic aspects of conversational coherence and cohesion, referential specificity, and repair strategies.

23. How to Assess2) Speech Acts a) Language Sample Analysis • Structuring the interaction to get the child to produce different speech acts -- especially requests (Roth & Spekman, 1984) • e.g., where child has to ask a “shy puppet” to do things • e.g., situations where the child has to solve a problem: • Pencils with broken points, puzzle with a piece missing, paints without brushes etc. b) Controlled Elicited Production Procedures • Question Asking (DELV-CR, 2003; de Villiers, 2004) • asking the right Wh-question to find out specific information • Communicative Role Taking (DELV-CR; de Villiers, 2004; TOPL, 1992) • understanding the communicative perspective of others and knowing what speech acts they are producing.

24. Key Features of Elicited Production Materials and Procedures • They provide referential support and pragmatic motivation for the language forms and functions to be produced, so they increase the likelihood that those forms and functions will be sampled in the assessment. • They constrain the range of appropriate utterances, so they are more easily scored than a more open-ended language sample. • They retain a considerable degree of communicative naturalness in the elicitation procedure rather than resorting to modeling and imitation to elicit these forms.

25. The Subject Sample • Data will be shown from 1014 four to nine year olds, most of them from working class backgrounds and from all regions of the USA (taken from the DELV-CR field testing). • There were 217 four-year-olds, 266 five-year-olds, 300 six-year-olds, 56 seven-year-olds, 101 eight-year-olds and 74 nine-year-olds. • Approximately 60% of the children were characterized by the testing clinicians as speakers of African American English (AAE), the other 40% as speakers of Mainstream American English (MAE). • Approximately 1/3rd of the children at each age and in each dialect group were identified by the participating clinicians and schools as having a specific language impairment and were receiving language services.

26. Question Asking • The child is shown a picture with something missing from it. • They have to ask the right question to find out what the event is about. • The missing elements of the pictures include objects, people, locations, tools, and causes of emotions -- so what, who, where, how, and why questions are motivated. • Different levels of prompting are given for each trial if the child does not spontaneously ask an appropriate question -- varying from the semantic domain of the question to ask, to the specific wh-word to begin the question with. • If the child asks an appropriate question they are shown the complete picture.

27. The girl is painting something. Ask me the right question and I’ll show you the answer. c. The Psychological Corporation

28. What? c. The Psychological Corporation

30. Wh-Question production in MAE and AAE speaking children following all prompts.

31. Wh-Question production in typically developing and language impaired children following all prompts.

32. Appropriate why-question production in MAE and AAE speaking children following semantic prompt.

33. Appropriate why-question production in typically-developing and language-impaired children following semantic prompt.

34. Communicative Role Taking and Understanding Speech Acts • Children not only need to produce different kind of speech acts at appropriate times (e.g., asking for information, requesting action, rejecting or denying, prohibiting etc.); they also need to understand the circumstances and force of those utterances in other people. • The children were shown pictures in which a person was communicating to another about some object or event that was clearly depicted. They were asked what the characters were telling (reporting an observed event), asking, or saying (prohibiting an action), depending on the scenario.

35. Picture context for “asking” (requesting an object or action). c. The Psychological Corporation

36. Picture context for “asking” (requesting an object or action). c. The Psychological Corporation

37. Communicative Role Taking in two AAE speaking four-year-olds.

38. Development of appropriate speech act production in a communicative role taking context (MAE versus AAE speaking children)

39. Development of appropriate speech act production in a communicative role taking context (typically developing versus language impaired children).

40. How to Assess? 3) Referential Communication and Specification • Telling my listener(s) who and what I am referring to. • Several linguistic devices in English serve to identify one object or person out of a possible set. • These include adjectives that specify a distinctive property of the object or person, prepositionalphrases that specify their location, and relativeclauses that refer to either a distinctive property, location, or action. • Eliciting these in a referential communication task • (P. de Villiers, 1988)

41. Reference Specification -- Testing Procedure • Examiner and child play a referential communication game. • The child sees a picture that the examiner cannot see. S/he has to describe an event that is happening in part of the picture so that the examiner can pick out the person or object involved in the event from a set of similar people or objects. • In some trials there is a distinctive property that distinguishes the referent. In others it is the location or action of the referent that must be mentioned. • In this way the linguistic form that must be produced increases in complexity from adjectives to prepositional phrases and finally to relative clauses.

42. Here are two horses. c. The Psychological Corporation

43. Tell me what is happening in the red box. I need to know which horse it is. c. The Psychological Corporation

44. Here are two policemen. c. The Psychological Corporation

45. Tell me what is happening in the red box. I need to know which policeman it is. c. The Psychological Corporation

46. Here are two boys. c. The Psychological Corporation

47. Tell me what is happening in the red box. I need to know which boy it is. c. The Psychological Corporation

48. Development of reference specification in MAE and AAE speaking children. Production of form and function following all prompts.

49. Development of reference specification in typically-developing and language-impaired children. Spontaneous production of form and function before any prompts.

50. Development of reference specification in typically-developing and language-impaired children. Production of form and function following all prompts.