Pragmatic Skills Checklist

Pragmatic skills facilitate our social interactions. We use pragmatics to get various social communication accomplished—we attend, request, tell, clarify. We also adjust our messages based on our knowledge of the situation and the participants involved. Children begin to learn social rules of communication very early, for example, seeking and maintaining eye contact during interactions in infancy. They learn to communicate their knowledge of the rules non-verbally at first, and then add verbal expressions as their language develops. Social conversational rules vary according to cultural group norms. For example, there are conversational rules for children’s peer culture, adult culture, and cultures that differ by other group identities, including language and country. We compare a child’s skills to what would be age-appropriate behavior in the child’s culture.