Looking for social pragmatic communication disorder in the complex world of Italian special needs: an exploratory study

Social Pragmatic Communication Disorder (SPCD) is characterised by a number of pragmatic difficulties and may lead to obstacles in school readiness. These difficulties also apply to children with Special Needs. Several authors pointed out the difficulty to detect SPCD, also considering the lack of sensitive assessment tools. The aim of this study is to investigate the pragmatic ability of children with BES not otherwise specified (BES-NOS), compared to a control group of children with Typical Development (TD) using the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo). Our expectation is that BES-NOS perform worse than children with TD. Furthermore, for exploratory purposes, we investigate whether it is possible to identify a subgroup of children with undiagnosed SPCD within the BES-NOS group, by performing a cluster analysis. Our results show that children with BES have a significantly lower pragmatic performance than the TD group and suggest the sensitivity of ABaCo in identifying individuals with undiagnosed SPCD among children and adolescents with BES-NOS.