Table 1.
Description of the pragmatic skills coding system—preschool version.
| CONVERSATIONAL COMPLEXITY SCALE (α = 0.68) | |
| Turnabout | Percentage of utterances that have the dual function of responding to the interlocutor and restarting the conversation by adding information [e.g., “But” (response) “This glass will be mine.” (expansion) (ICC = 0.67a)]. |
| Organization of utterances | Percentage of utterances that link more than one piece of information (regarding people, objects, time, location, action, etc.) in a single utterance [e.g., “I'm (subject) gonna eat (action) grapes (object).” (ICC = 0.79)]. |
| Number of new themes | Percentage of utterances that produce new themes (ICC = 0.62). |
| Abstraction level of themes | Percentage of utterances that introduce themes that are decontextualized in time (e.g., I'm gonna go skiing this winter), place or reality (fictitious/fantasy) (e.g., You you're the mom and I'm the dad (ICC = 0.89). |
| TALKATIVENESS SCALE (α = 0.71) | |
| Number of words | Number of words per minute (ICC = 1.00). |
| Number of utterances | Number of utterances per minute (ICC = 1.00). |
| Number of utterances per speaking turn | Percentage of utterances that express more than one utterance (separated by a delay of more than 2 s) per speaking turn (ICC = 0.93). |
| ASSERTIVENESS SCALE (α = 0.66) | |
| Initiations | Percentage of utterances that initiate conversation, rather than answering a question (ICC = 0.88). |
| Requests | Percentage of utterances that formulate requests (ICC = 0.56). |
| Conversation breakdown repairs | Percentage of utterances that repair conversation breakdowns (e.g., child: “Box.,” research assistant: “What?,” child: “The box.” (ICC = 0.52). |
| COMMUNICATIVE CONTROL SCALE (α = 0.38) | |
| Fluidity | Percentage of utterances that are free of involuntary and unnecessary repetition or hesitation (e.g., “I want the… the bottle”) (ICC = 0.93). |
| Non-interruption | Percentage of utterances that do not interrupt the interlocutor (ICC = 0.72). |
| RESPONSIVENESS SCALE (α = 0.61) | |
| Contingency | Percentage of utterances that adequately respond to a request by the interlocutor (e.g., research assistant: “Will you play with the puzzle?,” child: “OK.”) (ICC = 0.81). |
| Utterance clarity | Percentage of utterances that express clear and understandable statement (ICC = 0.14b). |
a
ICC, Intraclass correlation coefficient. The speech samples of this study were codified by the same person. However, the principal author and an undergraduate student codify eighteen speech samples separately, during the validation process of the PSCS-P, in order to compute the ICC of each variable.
b
This variable's ICC is below the “fair” level of 0.40 suggested by Cicchetti (1994). But when the inter-rater reliability is calculated in terms of percentage of agreement, the rate of this variable still remains relatively high at 91%, even higher than other variables. The lack of variability in this variable seems to have reduced the ICC.