Development of Hindi Pragmatic Language Skills in Indian Children
Abstract
The use of language within context is pragmatics. Since, there is no tool to assess Hindi pragmatics among Indian children, the present research aimed to develop a task to asses the same. In phase one, naturalistic observation, expert interviews, and text analysis of Hindi storybooks were conducted to understand the use of pragmatics. In phase two, Hindi Pragmatic language story narration (HPSN) and Hindi Pragmatic language video tasks (HPVT 1.0 and 2.0) were constructed to assess pragmatics. These were refined to develop Kids pragmatics Hindi videos (KPHV), used in phase three to investigate age and gender differences, further relationship with theory of mind was also examined. Children became significantly better in pragmatics with age. A significant relationship between pragmatics and theory of mind was also found. No significant effect of gender on pragmatics was observed. The findings of the study are useful for development of rehabilitation programs for children with Social Pragmatic Disorder (SPD). Keywords: Linguistics; Psychology; Development; Language development; Theory of Mind; Field studies; Statistics.