Participants

Participants in the SCIP project are children aged between 6 and 11 years old, attending mainstream schools. They have all been identified by their local SLT as having pragmatic language impairment (PLI) and scored at least 2 out of 5 on the SCIP PLI checklist. All children score in the communication impaired range on the Children’s Communication Checklist 2 (Bishop 2003).

Each child presents with their own unique profile and will have differing levels of difficulty across a variety of pragmatic and social features of language. These might include:

• Verbosity
• Frequent topic changes
• Misinterpretation of socially contextualised language
• Misunderstanding of non-literal language
• Difficulty in tailoring spoken language the listener

In addition, these children may display difficulties with:

• Understanding their own and other people’s thoughts and feelings
• Matching their behaviour to the social situation they find themselves in