2.2. Development of materials
Existing assessments of communication skills were examined to determine which would be most suitable for adaptation
to use in Brazil. Those selected comprised The Pragmatics Profile (Dewart & Summers, 1994) and the Bristol Language
Development Scales – BLADES (Gutfreund, Harrison, & Wells, 1989). The Pragmatics Profile approach has at its centre the
goal of recognizing the child’s communicative abilities in all situations and for all tasks of everyday life, while the BLADES is a
language development test which is suitable for use with any language, as it assesses only function and meaning, providing
categories for sentence semantics and sentence function. Together these tools assessed the main dimensions of
communication which were of interest to the research group and relevant to the participants and were ideal as sources for
development of a multiple element protocol.
The protocol used in this study is ‘modality-free’, in that the child’s communication in any modality (spoken, signed or
gestured) can be coded. It comprises the following sections: (1) Child Pragmatics Profile; (2) Modality-Free Measure of Child
Communication; (3) Mean Length of Longest Utterances; (4) Style and Efficacy of Communication between parent and child.
Each is described in detail below.
2.2.1. Child Pragmatics Profile
The Pragmatics Profile was based on Dewart and Summers (1994) (Appendix B). Assessment in this section relates to the
child’s communicative behaviour in both clinical and home contexts. Two measures of communication skills are obtained:
the first based on a play–interaction between the assessor and child, and the second, a parental report obtained by interview.
Three categories of communication function are coded: (1) communicative intentions, (2) response to communication, and
(3) interaction and conversation (Appendix B). Categories are based on events and everyday experiences. In the interview,
parents are asked ‘‘how’’ questions about the child’s typical communicative behaviour in daily life. The emphasis is on what
children can do rather than what they cannot do, for example: How does your child get your attention? How does she
indicate that she wants something? How does she reject something?