Expanding Language Norms for School-Age Children and Adolescents

Abstract

Despite decades of research, we currently have only limited norms of pragmatic development and use. These generally consist of skills that are aspects of pragmatic functioning, but in themselves do not capture the pragmatic difficulties exhibited by children in classroom, home, and social environments. A discussion of some of the problems associated with deriving pragmatic norms is presented, along with some of the current insights we have concerning the pragmatic abilities of older children and adolescents. These diverse findings are organized into a single coherent model for analyzing and comparing pragmatic performance across tasks. Implications for further research also are presented.