PURPOSE: To analyze the longitudinal performance of children with Language Impairments (LI) on a pragmatic test, in order to observe the development of communicative abilities through speech and language therapy (SLT). METHODS: Fifty six children from both sexes and ages ranging from 1;10 (years;months) and 5;11 in the first evaluation participated of this study. All subjects were diagnosed with Language Impairments (LI) and were engaged in language therapy for at least two years or were discharged before this period. We analyzed the pragmatic tests collected from patients' annual evaluations, since the beginning of SLT. Children's performance were scored from 0 to 4 (the worst to the best performance, respectively) based on severity criteria. The data was statistically analyzed using ANOVA, Tukey-T and Pearson, with a significance level of pd"0.05. RESULTS: Age was not a relevant variable to determine subject's performance at the first pragmatic assessment, except for one-year-old children (p=0,02), neither to predict the number of SLT sessions children needed to overcome the pragmatic deficit (p=0,72). Children who eventually achieved normal scores on the pragmatic test (64,3%) showed a better initial performance on that test than children who did not reach expected levels through the period considered in the study (p=0,01). Finally, whereas communicative mean was the parameter that mostly improved with SLT, the number of acts per minute was the variable the mostly remained impaired for children with LI. CONCLUSION: Initial performance of children with LI was more predictive of pragmatic abilities overcome (which happened to 64.3% of the sample) than other variables.
Language development; Language development disorders; Language development disorders; Verbal behavior; Communication; Language tests
