BACKGROUND pragmatic abilities in children. AIM to analyze the pragmatic abilities profile in normal preschool children and to verify if significant differences exist regarding the children's different socioeconomic levels. METHOD participants of this study were 30 children, with ages between 36 and 47 months, who attended public and private elementary schools - low and medium/high socioeco...

This article presents a study of a set of pointing gestures produced together with speech in a corpus of video-recorded ‘‘locality description’’ interviews in rural Laos. In a restricted set of the observed gestures (we did not consider gestures with special hand shapes, gestures with arc/tracing motion, or gestures directed at referents within physical reach), two basic formal types of pointin...

The prosodic and pragmatic analysis of some 450 examples of clefts, taken in corpora of spontaneous and natural speech, sheds light on the different functions that prosody can take on in discourse. The prosodic analysis is mainly based on the number of tone units, the place of the nuclear syllable and the pitch movement. The context is also taken into account. We show that clefts display a vari...

Discourse markers, a group of pragmatic elements, are used widely in our daily communication. Among these markers, well is found to be the most frequently used one in conversation. Although much research has been carried out on its theoretical bases such as its definition, functions and categorizations, few studies have taken a multimodal approach in analyzing this marker. The aim of the presen...

pragmatics is defined as appropriate use of language either to comprehend ideas or to interact in social situations effectively. pragmatic competence, which is processed in the right hemisphere, comprises a number of interrelated skills that manifest in a range of adaptive behaviors. due to the widespread influence of language in communication, studying pragmatic profiles, by developing appropr...

The role of executive functions in supporting the pragmatics communication has been extensively examined clinical populations, but is still under-explored healthy aging. In this study we addressed skills, including inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, older adults’ communicative-pragmatic abilities. Pragmatics was assessed by measuring understanding figurative language, narrat...

 Second language  learners often develop grammatical competence in the absence of concomitant pragmatic competence (Kasper & Roever, 2005) and the exact nature of the relationship between the two competences is still indistinct and in need of inquiries ( Bardovi-Harlig, 1999; Khatib & Ahmadisafa, 2011). This study is a partial attempt to address the lacuna and aims to see if any relationship ca...