What are the Developmental Milestones for Pragmatic Language?

If you are anything like me, you have spent too much time searching for pragmatic language developmental milestones. In my personal experience, finding these norms that have been broken down into easy-to-use lists is relatively impossible.

Until now.

Before breaking pragmatic language down into developmental milestones, we must answer an important question: “What is pragmatic language?”

According to ASHA, “Pragmatics is an area of social communication focusing on goal-consistent language use in social contexts (Nelson, 2010). It is the set of rules that individuals follow when using language in conversation and other social settings. Culturally responsive practice seeks to understand pragmatic norms specific to the student, client, or patient. Pragmatics includes both verbal and nonverbal communication.”

Examples of Pragmatic Language Include:

• Using language for different reasons,
• Changing language for the listener or situation
• Following rules for conversation and
• Following the rules of storytelling”
• Nonverbal communication (gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, proxemics, eye contact)

Now that we know what pragmatic language is let’s talk about developmental norms.

First, I would just like to say that finding pragmatic language developmental milestones is ridiculously hard. In my experience, they are lumped into lists with every other type of language development.

What I NEED is developmental norms that have been organized in an easy-to-use format.

If it was up to me, here is how I would organize pragmatic language developmental milestones:

1. They need to originate from a reputable source
2. They need to be separated and chronologically organized into each area of pragmatic language
   • Using language for different reasons
   • Changing language for the listener or situation
   • Conversation
   • Storytelling
   • Nonverbal communication
   • Play skills as it relates to social skills
   • Jokes, Idioms, and Figurative Language
3. They would need to be transformed into easy-to-use handouts that can simultaneously be given to parents and teachers but also used by SLPs to interpret pragmatic language evaluations.

Oh wait-it was up to me! I created pragmatic language handouts exactly like that!

Here is how I developed these pragmatic language developmental milestone handouts:

• A loooong time ago, I bookmarked the speech and language developmental milestones from the Spiffy Speech blog. (If you haven’t done it, take a second and do it now. I reference them all the time. )
  Note: most of these resources were originally compiled in the SLPs for Evidence-Based Practice Facebook group by Tatyana Elleseff, group admin, under the Giant Milestones post.
• I sifted through all of the norms related to social communication and/or pragmatic language development. I used this information from various publications to create the handouts.
• There is one handout for each of the areas of pragmatic language listed above.

How do I use these pragmatic language developmental milestones?

1. Informal Pragmatic Language Evaluations. I primarily use these to help me interpret the results of my informal pragmatic language assessments.
2. Caregiver Handouts. I also use these handouts to educate parents and teachers on what pragmatic language is and what is appropriate for a student their age.