University of Hertfordshire

Pragmatic language development is characterised by an increasing ability to use context to construct meaning, which is relevant to the interpretation intended by the speaker. As children develop language competence, they are increasingly able to utilise context and integrate available information (i.e. world knowledge, cues from the environment, intonation). Children with pragmatic difficulties have been found to be poor at semantic inferencing and to respond irrelevantly (Adams and Lloyd 2005, Bishop 1998, 2000).

In our research, using a theory of communication (Relevance Theory, Sperber and Wilson 1995), children with pragmatic difficulties (English and Finnish) were found to have some problems with inferencing but differed from other SLI children in their ability to recover implicatures. As standard language tests have so far been unsuccessful in identifying these children, we are investigating the suitability of using the recovery of implicatures as a means to identify children with pragmatic difficulties.