It remains unclear whether pragmatic language skills and core language skills (grammar and vocabulary) are distinct language domains. The present work aimed to tease apart these domains using a novel online assessment battery administered to almost 400 children aged 7 to 13 years. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that pragmatic and core language domains could be measured separately, but that both domains were highly related (r = .79). However, zero-order correlations between pragmatic tests were quite small, indicating that task-specific skills played an important role in performance, and follow-up exploratory factor analysis suggested that pragmatics might be best understood as a family of skills rather than a domain. This means that these different pragmatic skills may have different cognitive underpinnings and also need to be assessed separately. However, our overall results supported the idea that pragmatic and core aspects of language are closely related during development, with one area scaffolding development in the other.

中文翻译：

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一种对语用和核心语言技能的新颖在线评估：尝试梳理儿童的语言领域

目前尚不清楚语用语言技能和核心语言技能（语法和词汇）是否是不同的语言领域。目前的工作旨在使用对近 400 名 7 至 13 岁儿童进行管理的新型在线评估系统来梳理这些领域。验证性因素分析表明，语用和核心语言领域可以分开衡量，但两个领域高度相关（r= .79)。然而，语用测试之间的零阶相关性非常小，表明特定于任务的技能在绩效中起着重要作用，后续探索性因素分析表明，最好将语用学理解为技能家族而不是领域。这意味着这些不同的语用技能可能具有不同的认知基础，也需要单独评估。然而，我们的总体结果支持这样一种观点，即语言的语用和核心方面在开发过程中密切相关，其中一个领域是另一个领域的脚手架开发。