Pragmatic language characteristics of children with mild intellectual disabilities using audio-visual discourse tasks (KOPLAC)

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to investigate the pragmatic language characteristics of school-aged children with mild intellectual disabilities. To do so, this study examined general pragmatic competence and its sub-domains of pragmatic language. Methods: Thirty-six children participated in this study: 12 mild intellectual disabilities (ID group), 12 age-matched normally developing children (CA-TD), and 12 vocabulary age-matched children (LA-TD). The Korean Meta-Pragmatic Language Assessment for Children (KOPLAC) was used for pragmatic language assessment. It consists of three sub-domains: communication regulation, discourse and story information inferences, and meta-linguistic awareness. Results: CA-TD showed significantly higher performances than ID and LA-TD in communication regulations (conversation partner and communication context regulation) and the irony/metaphor task. However, there were no significant differences between ID and LA-TD. The results showed significant differences in performance on indirect expression tasks and reference language among the three groups. ID group showed significantly lower performance than CA-TD and LA-TD in the storytelling task. However, we found no significant differences between CA-TD and LA-TD in the storytelling task. Conclusion: The three groups showed significant differences in general pragmatic competence and the sub-domains of pragmatic language. These results imply that school-aged children with intellectual disabilities have weaker pragmatic language abilities. Based on these findings, children with intellectual disabilities may need more support to improve their pragmatic language abilities. The results also suggest that pragmatic language abilities may need to be considered when assessing and intervening with school-aged ID children.