Pragmatic language skills in Swedish-speaking children and connections to grammatical and broader developmental-behavioral skills – A longitudinal study

Language is a key for children’s well-being.

This project focuses on the early pragmatic language development, with pragmatics referring to the social function of communication. It investigates three research questions: How do pragmatic language skills develop in young Swedish children? What associations can be found between pragmatic and grammatical skills?

What associations can be found between pragmatic and developmental-behavioral skills?

A parent report on early pragmatic language skills will be distributed to 400 families with children between 1–4-years. The families are part of the NorthPop study (www.northpop.se) on health factors for children, prebirth to age 7.

The design is a prospective longitudinal population-based cohort study, yielding cross-sectional and longitudinal data, allowing for between- and within-group comparisons.

The quantitative and qualitative analyses target types of pragmatic skills and their relation to age, gender, and grammatical and developmental-behavioral skills.

The project will run for three years and involve a PI from linguistics and three researchers from speech therapy and pediatrics.

To have a validated tool for measuring young children´s language abilities, as provided by this project, is of high societal impact, given that early language difficulties often remain and may affect life outcome.

To clarify connections between children’s pragmatic, grammatical, and developmental-behavioral skills would also have scientific impact.