Pragmatic Profiling in Down Syndrome

Abstract

Pragmatics has been described as the study of the rules prevailing in the use of language in social context. Pragmatic or communicative competence is the capability to produce socially and culturally appropriate spoken discourse in a variety of participation configurations, including the interpersonal mode. In contrast, children with difficult in recognizing and satisfying the social rules of language are usually described as having pragmatic disabilities.

The present study aimed to profile the pragmatic skills in Malayalam speaking Down syndrome in the age range of 4-12 years. The study involved a total number of 10 children and 5 children each across the age group of 4-7.11 years and 8-11.11 years of mental age. The statistical result shows that their exit a significant difference in the age group of 4-7.11 years and 8-11.11 years for clinician initiated and self-initiated pragmatic skills and no significant difference across the age group for both the clinician initiated and self-initiated. The present study concluded that as the age increases couple of clinician initiated pragmatic skills like eye contact, gaze exchange, joint attention, labeling answering question turn taking, reapir, topic initiation topic maintance and adding information were improved. Pragmatic skills like smiling, request for object and feedback was same across the age. Negation got decline with age. In self -initiating skill, refusal, stylistic variation, turn taking, narration topic initiation, maintance, topic change initiation of joint attention and request for repair were improved as age increases. Communicative intent and questioning were same across the age.