Proposal of a questionnaire to investigate social communication skills of children with typical development and communication disorders

ABSTRACT Purpose: to verify the possibility of administering a simple questionnaire to family members who communicate with their children to identify communication functional characteristics of children with different manifestations of language development. Methods: 95 parents/guardians were individually interviewed. Their children were afterwards diagnosed with language disorder (LD), speech production disorder (SPD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and typical development (TD). The interviews were conducted with the Communicative Skills Questionnaire to characterize the pragmatic performance. The Student’s t-test and the principal component analysis were used in statistical analysis, considering significant p-values < 0.05. Results: the statistical analyses reveal that the questionnaire distinguished the groups of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and language disorder from the groups of children with speech production disorders and typical development. Conclusion: the questionnaire proved to be capable of distinguishing and characterizing, from the pragmatic standpoint, the children with different manifestations of communication development, revealing the impaired pragmatic skills of children with autism spectrum disorders and language disorders.