To comprehend language is beyond only understanding the meaning of the word and how a combination of words according to the grammar of the language produces the meaning of a sentence. To completely understand a sentence and a discourse, linguistic com...
To comprehend language is beyond only understanding the meaning of the word and how a combination of words according to the grammar of the language produces the meaning of a sentence. To completely understand a sentence and a discourse, linguistic comprehension based on semantic and syntactic level is incomplete, and pragmatic comprehension based on the context is necessary. The context for understanding what a speaker means is the common ground that the listener believes applies at that moment between the speaker and the listener he or she is speaking to. There are three sources of common ground. The first source in comprehension is linguistic co-presence. The listener takes as common ground between him and the speaker all of their conversation up to and including the utterance currently being interpreted. The second source is physical co-presence. The listener takes as common ground what he and the speaker are currently experiencing and have already experienced. The last source is community membership. If something is universally known in a community, then two people in that community can assume that they mutually know it.
Recently, emphasizing the importance of communicative skills, many researchers have studied the pragmatic ability of children with a specific language impairment. However, most of the previous research on language- disordered children's ability in pragmatics have focused on expression and interaction. A few studies have been done in the pragmatic comprehension area and even among them, the results were inconsistent.
The purposes of the present study are to examine the ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) with respect to (1) compre- hending informative utterance, (2) using common ground in comprehending ambiguous utterance, and (3) monitoring insufficient information, compared with normal children, and (4) to explore the relationship of the ability to use common ground and recognize insufficient information with respect to non- verbal intelligence, sentence comprehension and social cognition, respectively
The participants were 20 children with specific language impairment, 20 chronological age (CA) matched children, and 20 language ability (LA) matched children. 24 short vignettes which included a speaker, a listener, three or four sentences of context and a referential utterance by the speaker to the listener about one of the objects in the display, were constructed. After the children listened to the vignettes, each accompanied by a set of six pictures of objects randomly placed with varying details, they were asked to choose an object.
The study results were as follows: (1) Children with SLI were significantly inferior to CA matched children but similar to LA matched children in comprehending informative utterance. (2) Children with SLI were significantly inferior to the other two groups in using the common ground based on linguistic co-presence. However, in using the common ground based on community membership, children with SLI and LA matched children were significantly inferior to CA matched children. (3) In recognizing insufficient information, children with SLI and LA matched children were significantly inferior to CA matched children. (4) In using the common ground to compre- hend ambiguous utterances, performance of all three groups of children showed significant correlation with sentence comprehension ability, but in recognizing insufficient information, children with SLI didn't show any correlation with tasks. However, CA matched children showed significant correlation with sentence comprehension ability, and LA matched children showed significant correlation with social cognition.
These results suggest that children with SLI have difficulty beyond their linguistic problem. Also it suggests that children with SLI use different strategies than normal children in dealing with comprehension problems.