The social communication is viewed as ongoing verbal and
nonverbal behaviors during interactive contexts. It apparent that
conceptualizations of both social and communicative competence share
two features. The social competence is concerned with relationships
between children and those with whom they interact. And the
communicative competence evaluates appropriateness form the
perspective of the linguistic, paralinguistic, and nonverbal communication
and the relationships between utterances in connected discourse.
As researchers become increasingly interested in classifying
children with communication disorders more precisely, the difficulties in
describing the specific social communication characteristics of different profiles
of impairment have been high lighted. Also in the population of
children with developmental language disorders, a subgroup(e.g., SLI,
autistic disorder) has been identified whose difficulties lie principally with
the use of language in social contexts.
This paper aims to discriminating the social communication skills of
school-aged children with pragmatic language impairments(PLI) and to
compare specific language impairments(SLI), high functioning
autism(HFA) and through these to identify shortcomings in current
clinical knowledge to be addressed in future research.
Fifteen school-aged children with PLI, SLI, HFA and grade matched
control group were selected using the SCQ, CCC-2, REVT, LSSC,
K-WISC-Ⅲ. All children were assessed on social communication skills
elicitation using structured evaluation that was analogous to classroom
setting. The frequency of occurrence of total social communication,
proportion of verbal/nonverbal behavior, proportion of
initiation/response, and proportion of initiation/response each social
interaction types were analysed. Significant between group differences
were found for both social communication in structured evaluation.
The results were as follows : (1) The social communication skills of
school aged children with PLI performed lower frequency of occurrence
of total social communication than NR. The proportion of verbal
behavior and initiation were lower in PLI compared to HFA while
proportion of nonverbal behavior and response were higher than HFA.
The PLI performed to respond very passively. (2) The social
communication skills of school aged children with HFA performed higher
proportion of verbal behavior and initiation than PLI while proportion of
nonverbal behavior and response were lower than PLI. The HFA
performed to respond and initiate irrelevantly or assertively. (3) The social communication skills
of school aged children with SLI performed
lower proportion of initiation than HFA while proportion of response
were higher than HFA. The SLI relatively performed to respond
prosocial.
This results provided to discriminate social communication skills of
pragmatic language impairments(PLI) from children with more typical
specific language impairments(SLI) on the one hand, and high
functioning autism(HFA) on the other. Also this paper implies the
importance of a structured group task in addition to one to one
interaction in assessment and/or intervention of social communication
skills. Finally, this study suggested through these to identify
shortcomings in current results to be addressed in future research.