The Processes Underlying Positive Illusory Bias in ADHD: The Role of Executive Functions and Pragmatic Language Skills

Objective: Children with ADHD often show a positive illusory bias (PIB), reporting an extremely positive idea of their own competence, despite their difficulties. The mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are still poorly understood. In the present study, we examined social PIB and investigated the role of executive functions (EFs) and pragmatic language (PL). Method: Forty-one children with ADHD and 42 typically-developing children matched on age, IQ, and receptive language were administered measures of social competence, EFs and PL. The parents were also asked to estimate their child’s social competence. Results: There was evidence of social difficulties and PIB in children with ADHD. Only PL, not EFs, seemed to mediate the association between ADHD and PIB. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that PL abilities should be considered in efforts to improve self-perception in children with ADHD.

Discussion of Issues Related to Assessment of Signed or Spoken Language Development in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

This chapter is a joint discussion of key items presented in Chapters 4.1 and 4.2 related to the assessment of deaf and hearing children on the autism spectrum . From these chapters it becomes apparent that a number of aspects associated with signed language assessment are relevant to spoken language assessment. For example, there are several precautions to bear in mind about language assessments obtained via an interpreter. Some of these precautions apply solely to D/HH children, while others are applicable to assessments with hearing children in multilingual contexts. Equally, there are some aspects of spoken language assessment that can be applied to signed language assessment. These include the importance of assessing pragmatic language skills, assessing multiple areas of language development, differentiating between ASD and other developmental disorders, and completing the language evaluation within a developmental framework. The authors conclude with suggestions for both spoken and signed language assessment.

Predicting Quality of Life and Behavior and Emotion from Functional Auditory and Pragmatic Language Abilities in 9-Year-Old Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

Children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) are likely to exhibit difficulties in development of psychosocial skills, pragmatic language skills, and use of hearing for social communication in real-world environments. Some evidence suggests that pragmatic language use affects peer-relationships and school engagement in these children. However, no studies have investigated the influence of functional auditory performance and use of language and speech in real-world environments on children’s behavior and emotion, and on their health-related quality of life. This study explored the relationship in DHH children at 9 years of age. Data from 144 participants of the Longitudinal Outcomes of Children with Hearing Impairment study were analyzed. Parent reports were obtained on quality of life, behavior and emotion, pragmatic language skills, and auditory functional performance of children in real life. Children’s spoken language abilities and speech intelligibility were assessed by research speech pathologists. On average, performance of children in all domains was within the range of typically developing peers. There were significant associations among functional auditory performance, use of speech and language skills, psychosocial skills, and quality of life. Multiple linear regression analyses revealed that better auditory functional performance and pragmatic language skills, rather than structural language abilities, were associated with better psychosocial abilities and quality of life. The novel findings highlight the importance of targeted intervention for improving functional hearing skills and social communication abilities in DHH children, and emphasize the importance of collaborative approaches among medical, audiology, allied health, and educational professionals to identify those at risk so that timely referral and intervention can be implemented for improving psychosocial health and well-being in DHH children.

How do 3-year-olds use relevance inferencing to interpret indirect speech?

If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, ‘I have a cough’, the requesting child must make a ‘relevance inference’ to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive skills relate to relevance inferencing. In addition, we asked whether children’s lab-based pragmatic performance relates to children’s parent-assessed pragmatic language skills. We tested 3.5- to 4-year-old speakers of British English (Study 1: N = 40, Study 2: N = 32). Children were presented with video-recorded vignettes ending with an utterance requiring a relevance inference, for which children made a forced choice. Study 1 measured children’s Theory of Mind, their sentence comprehension and their real-world knowledge and found that only real-world knowledge retained significance in a regression analysis with children’s relevance inferencing as the outcome variable. Study 2 then manipulated children’s world-knowledge through priming but found this did not improve children’s performance on the relevance inferencing task. Study 2 did, however, reveal a significant correlation between children’s relevance inferencing and a measure of morpho-syntactic production. In both studies parents rated their children’s pragmatic language usage in daily life, which was found to relate to performance in our lab-based relevance inferencing task. This set of studies is the first to empirically demonstrate that lab-based measures of relevance inferencing are reflective of children’s pragmatic abilities ‘in the wild’. There was no clear association between relevance inferencing and Theory of Mind. There was mixed evidence for the role of formal language, which should be further investigated. Finally, real-world knowledge was indeed associated with relevance inferencing but future experimental work is required to test causal relations.

How do three-year-olds use relevance inferencing to interpret indirect speech

If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies “I have a cough”, the requesting child must make a ‘relevance inference’ to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive skills relate to relevance inferencing. Additionally, we asked whether children’s lab-based pragmatic performance relates to children’s parent-assessed pragmatic language skills. We tested 3½- to 4-year-olds (Study 1: N = 40, Study 2: N = 32). Children were presented with video-recorded vignettes ending with an utterance requiring a relevance inference, for which children made a forced choice. Study 1 measured children’s Theory of Mind, their sentence comprehension and their real-world knowledge and found that only real-world knowledge retained significance in a regression analysis with children’s relevance inferencing as the outcome variable. Study 2 then manipulated children’s world-knowledge via priming but found this did not improve children’s performance on the relevance inferencing task. Study 2 did, however, find a significant correlation between children’s relevance inferencing and a measure of morpho-syntactic production. In both studies parents rated their children’s pragmatic language usage in daily life, which was found to relate to performance in our lab-based relevance inferencing task. This set of studies is the first to empirically demonstrate that lab-based measures of relevance inferencing are reflective of children’s pragmatic abilities ‘in the wild’. We argue that real-world knowledge is a necessary (but not sufficient) for relevance inferencing.

A novel online assessment of pragmatic and core language skills: An attempt to tease apart language domains in children

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.

Assessing Pragmatic Language Skills in Adults with Major Depressive Disorder: An Exploratory Study

Introduction: There is increasing evidence that major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with significant pragmatic language impairments. However, there is a lack of studies that use standardized tools and simultaneously investigate all pragmatic language skills among MDD patients. The aim of this study was to propose a more thorough investigation of all pragmatic language skills in patients with MDD. Methods: Twenty adults (aged 22–65) with a DSM-5 diagnosis of MDD were assessed using BLED Santa Lucia (Batteria sul Linguaggio dell’Emisfero Destro Santa Lucia), a battery designed to evaluate pragmatic language skills (comprehension of inferences, of picture and written metaphors, of indirect requests, of humoristic expressions, and of prosody). The performance of the MDD participants on all BLED Santa Lucia subscales was compared to 20 healthy control subjects (aged 20–60) matched for gender, age, years of education, and employment status. Results: MDD patients performed poorer than controls in comprehension of inferences (p < 0.01), picture metaphors (p < 0.001), written metaphors (p < 0.001), indirect requests (p < 0.01), humoristic expression (p < 0.05), and prosody (p < 0.05). Conclusions: All pragmatic language skills can be significantly impaired in MDD patients. A valid assessment of all pragmatic language skills can allow, for each patient, the definition of a specific profile of risk and protective factors before and during psychotherapy.