Abstract:

Until the date, professionals who care about social communication improvement in children with developmental disabilities find it difficult to establish differential diagnoses within children who display these kind of problems (commonly named as pragmatic problems), as they could come together with different disorders. In this sense, an atypical social use of language (eg. Initiating conversations, understanding verbal and non-verbal language in different context, etc.), are typical in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), but also in children with Communication Disorders (CD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), above all during school ages (4 to 12 years old). Moreover, pragmatics includes different skills were these children can have concurring problems: the "socio-cognitive" skills (linked to Theory of Mind or Social Cognition, to grasp communicative intentions, emotional aspects, etc.), and "linguistic" skills (linked to the ability to establish implicates and inferences between the context and the utterance). These skills are very important to the correct school integration of these children in mainstream schools, and therefore, we need comprehensive and effective tools to assess pragmatic skills.

Therefore, the presented app aims to evaluate in a comprehensive way the use and understanding of pragmatics of language in children with communication difficulties (ASD, CD and ADHD). The items of the app assess different skills: the use and understanding of indirect and non-literal language (like metaphor or irony), lexical disambiguation (homonyms), reference, narrative, use and understanding of speech acts, non-verbal language understanding (gestures, facial expressions), etc. This knowledge is dependent on language but also executive function and theory of mind skills; so it will help to clarify which pragmatic problems are typical for each child. In this sense, as a practical an useful tool, the app is designed to establish a base line to perform an adapted intervention on pragmatics.

We conclude that, given the challenges of the information society in where we live, it is necessary and expected by professional that some tools for the assessment and intervention must be available in digital format for different reasons: availability and dissemination of material, effectiveness (financial and time) in its use, and the motivation of children when using it.

Keywords:

Mobile apps, assessing, social communication, intervention.