Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, UK.
J Child Lang. 2022 Jan;49(1):38-59. doi: 10.1017/S0305000920000690. Epub 2021 Mar 15.
It remains unclear whether pragmatic language skills and core language skills (grammar and vocabulary) are distinct language domains. The present work aimed to tease apart these domains using a novel online assessment battery administered to almost 400 children aged 7 to 13 years. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that pragmatic and core language domains could be measured separately, but that both domains were highly related (r = .79). However, zero-order correlations between pragmatic tests were quite small, indicating that task-specific skills played an important role in performance, and follow-up exploratory factor analysis suggested that pragmatics might be best understood as a family of skills rather than a domain. This means that these different pragmatic skills may have different cognitive underpinnings and also need to be assessed separately. However, our overall results supported the idea that pragmatic and core aspects of language are closely related during development, with one area scaffolding development in the other.
目前尚不清楚语用语言技能和核心语言技能（语法和词汇）是否是截然不同的语言领域。本研究旨在使用一种新的在线评估工具来区分这些领域，该工具评估了近 400 名 7 至 13 岁的儿童。验证性因子分析表明，可以分别测量语用和核心语言领域，但这两个领域高度相关（r =.79）。然而，语用测试之间的零阶相关性非常小，这表明特定任务的技能在表现中起着重要作用，后续的探索性因子分析表明，语用学最好被理解为一系列技能，而不是一个领域。这意味着这些不同的语用技能可能有不同的认知基础，也需要分别进行评估。然而，我们的总体结果支持这样一种观点，即语言的语用和核心方面在发展过程中密切相关，一个领域为另一个领域的发展提供了支撑。
