Abstract:

Social communication problems are a diagnostic criteria for children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD), but recent studies have demonstrated that some children with ASD and good structural language skills have age-appropriate skills in some of these areas. In parallel, pragmatic difficulties are also present in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), however there are not such number of studies in comparison to ASD, and many areas of pragmatics are not explored within this population. Therefore, it is important to define these difficulties in both disorders. Moreover, language instruments and tests use to have a subscale to assess social (pragmatic) communication skills, however they tend to focus on partial aspects of this huge area (e.g. figurative language understanding), forgetting other aspects that have been studied in empirical studies (e.g. reference skills). Finally, practitioners need to plan adapted interventions for these children in base to different assessments, application mobiles (apps) offer advantages over traditional materials: on the one hand for practitioners (e.g. quick to access, rapid assessments) and in the other hand for children (e.g. multisensoriality, motivation).

The aim of the present research is to assess social communication skills of three groups of school-period children (ASD, DLD and Typically-Developing children-TD) with a novel app (PleaseApp). This app is based in empirical studies about pragmatic development in children with and without disorder, and it assesses ten different areas of social communication and pragmatics (politeness, gesture-speech integration, learning words from context, figurative language, complex mental inferences, referring expressions, sequencing in narrative, indirect requests, humour understanding, , and metapragmatic conversation skills) through familiar-children contexts (e.g. school).

First, between-group comparisons showed differences between clinical groups (ASD and DLD) and TD group. Secondly, inter-group differences were also detected between the ASD and DLD groups in some pragmatic areas.

Finally, we conclude PleaseApp helps to study in depth concrete social communication and pragmatic difficulties in children with ASD but also for children with DLD, which is very important to plan adapted intervention methods for these children during school period. Authors thank the support from Grant UJI-A2016-12 funded by Universitat Jaume I de Castelló.

Keywords:

Pragmatics, social communication, Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), app, assessment.