Pragmatic Skills in Children with Different Types of Learning Disability: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The study aimed to evaluate and compare pragmatic skills in children with Learning disability who had dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyslexia & dysgraphia and mixed type (dyslexia + dysgraphia + dyscalculia) with typical developing age matched children. A total of 40 children within the age range of 11-13 years participated in the study. The participants were divided into five groups with eight each. To assess pragmatic skills Pragmatic Protocol by Prutting and Kischner (1987) was used. The test consisted of 3 subtasks i.e. verbal, paralinguistic and non-verbal aspects. Each child was engaged in conversation with clinician for 20-30 minutes. The responses were scored and subjected to statistical analysis using SPSS (version 16.0) software.The study results indicated poorer performance for verbal aspects and better performance for paralinguistic aspects in all children with Learning disability. The children with mixed type of learning disability had poorer performance on verbal and non-verbal aspects of pragmatics compared to all other groups of children with and without learning disability. Hence,it can be concluded that not only children with learning disability have poorer pragmatic competence but also within them there are large variability’s.