There is some evidence supporting the effectiveness of psychological interventions in EOP. However, most research on adolescents is focused on CRT and its effects on cognitive deficits. More studies on the effects of psychological interventions in EOP are needed.
If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, ‘I have a cough’, the requesting child must make a ‘relevance inference’ to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive skills relate to relevance inferencing. In addition, we asked whether children’s lab-based pragmatic performance relates to children’s parent-assessed pragmatic language skills. We tested 3.5- to 4-year-old speakers of British English (Study 1: N = 40, Study 2: N = 32). Children were presented with video-recorded vignettes ending with an utterance requiring a relevance inference, for which children made a forced choice. Study 1 measured children’s Theory of Mind, their sentence comprehension and their real-world knowledge and found that only real-world knowledge retained significance in a regression analysis with children’s relevance inferencing as the outcome variable. Study 2 then manipulated children’s world-knowledge through priming but found this did not improve children’s performance on the relevance inferencing task. Study 2 did, however, reveal a significant correlation between children’s relevance inferencing and a measure of morpho-syntactic production. In both studies parents rated their children’s pragmatic language usage in daily life, which was found to relate to performance in our lab-based relevance inferencing task. This set of studies is the first to empirically demonstrate that lab-based measures of relevance inferencing are reflective of children’s pragmatic abilities ‘in the wild’. There was no clear association between relevance inferencing and Theory of Mind. There was mixed evidence for the role of formal language, which should be further investigated. Finally, real-world knowledge was indeed associated with relevance inferencing but future experimental work is required to test causal relations.
Aim The aim of this study was to compare clinical characteristics and treatment outcomes between children with Childhood‐onset schizophrenia spectrum disorders (COSS) and children with other severe non‐psychotic psychiatric conditions (non‐COSS), all admitted to a national mental health inpatient children's unit. Methods We conducted a retrospective study of all children discharged from a national children's inpatient unit in the United Kingdom, between 2009 and 2018. We compared functional and treatment outcomes and satisfaction with treatment in COSS with non‐COSS in the whole sample and separately for male and female patients. Results A total of 211 children (55% boys) were included in the sample. The mean age on admission was 129.7 months (10.8 years; age range, 6‐12).Twenty cases were diagnosed with COSS (9.5%). In the whole sample, COSS patients had significantly lower Children's Global Assessment Scale (CGAS) scores on admission compared to non‐COSS (P = .006). There was a trend towards children with COSS as a group having a longer admission (M = 194.6 days, SD = 125.4) compared to non‐COSS (M = 135.8 days, SD = 86.2), (P = .053). Females with COSS seemed to have more significant differences compared to females with non‐COSS, in particular, longer admissions (P = .016) and worse CGAS scores at discharge (P = .04), whilst in males, these differences seemed to be attenuated. Conclusions Children with COSS have lower functioning at the point of inpatient admission and possibly longer admissions, but similar satisfaction with treatment at discharge from hospital compared with non‐COSS. Females with COSS may have worse functional outcomes compared to non‐COSS at discharge.
If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies “I have a cough”, the requesting child must make a ‘relevance inference’ to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive skills relate to relevance inferencing. Additionally, we asked whether children’s lab-based pragmatic performance relates to children’s parent-assessed pragmatic language skills. We tested 3½- to 4-year-olds (Study 1: N = 40, Study 2: N = 32). Children were presented with video-recorded vignettes ending with an utterance requiring a relevance inference, for which children made a forced choice. Study 1 measured children’s Theory of Mind, their sentence comprehension and their real-world knowledge and found that only real-world knowledge retained significance in a regression analysis with children’s relevance inferencing as the outcome variable. Study 2 then manipulated children’s world-knowledge via priming but found this did not improve children’s performance on the relevance inferencing task. Study 2 did, however, find a significant correlation between children’s relevance inferencing and a measure of morpho-syntactic production. In both studies parents rated their children’s pragmatic language usage in daily life, which was found to relate to performance in our lab-based relevance inferencing task. This set of studies is the first to empirically demonstrate that lab-based measures of relevance inferencing are reflective of children’s pragmatic abilities ‘in the wild’. We argue that real-world knowledge is a necessary (but not sufficient) for relevance inferencing.
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