Pragmatic language and the child with emotional/behavioural difficulties (EBD): a pilot study exploring the interaction between behaviour and communication disability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The relationship between mental health, behaviour and language development is widely recognized in the literature. Recent advances in assessment tools allows one to consider the role of pragmatic language skills in this co-occurrence. AIMS: This pilot study aimed to investigate (1) the level of association between pragmatic language difficulties and emotional/behavioural difficulties; and (2) what explanations there might there be for any such association. The roles of language, word decoding, and non-verbal cognitive ability and also socio-demographic factors are considered. METHOD & PROCEDURES: Seventeen participants aged 7-11 years were identified from Educational Psychologist caseloads as having behaviour that is causing concern at school. Comparisons were made with 16 age- and sex-matched controls. Participants' language, literacy and non-verbal cognitive ability were assessed at school. Parents and teachers completed questionnaires investigating communication skills, behaviour and emotional wellbeing. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: No significant difference was found between the groups for non-verbal cognitive ability. However, children in the referred group were significantly more likely to have structural language, word decoding and pragmatic language difficulties and mothers with no further education beyond school. Taking a broad view of language skills to include structural language, pragmatic language and word decoding, 94% (n = 15) of referred children had significant difficulties with at least one of these three factors. The only factor not found on its own was structural language difficulties, indicating that on their own they are perhaps not associated with emotional/behavioural difficulties. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: The results of this pilot study have implications for how we view language and behaviour difficulties in primary schools. Future larger-scale research should consider the role of parenting factors, pragmatic language skills and literacy ability in the high co-existence rate of emotional/behavioural difficulties and language/communication needs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".