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 socioeconomic levels respectively. A thirty minute semi-structured conversation between each child and the evaluator was recorded in VHS. For the analysis of the pragmatic abilities profile 20 minutes of each conversation was transcribed.
Results: there is a prevalence of verbal over non-verbal and unintelligible utterances; simple over expansive utterances; coherent over incoherent utterances. There was a low occurrence of utterances used to start a conversation. Regarding the use of communicative functions, the informative function prevailed, even though all the others (instrumental, heuristic, naming, narrative, negative, interactive) were used by all of the children. Comparing the performance of children who attended public schools with that of children who attended private schools, statistically significant differences were observed in the number of simple and expansive verbal utterances, and in the use of the narrative function, indicating a better performance of children from private institutions.
Conclusion: the analysis of the children's conversational abilities profile revealed that they respond/maintain the conversation instead of initiating it; their utterances are verbal, mostly coherent and simple. Regarding the communicative functions, the most prevalent was the informative function. Sociolinguistic aspects can interfere in the pragmatic abilities of children of different socioeconomic level.