Is early pragmatic development measurable?

Abstract

Measures of pragmatic development for children in the second year of life were developed, based on a brief (30 minute) language sample and on structured elicitation conditions. When age is partialled out, number of pragmatic functions expressed is not statistically related to MLU, due to the fact that the number of functions grows steadily during the one-word and very early two-word phases. Performance on the structured imperative tasks also reflects development during this period, though performance on the declarative tasks does not. We conclude that the range of pragmatic functions in the second year is measurable and contributes information not provided by a measure of syntactic development such as MLU. Such information should prove useful for research on language and cognition in normal and language-impaired children.