Children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) manifest pragmatic difficulties when relating with other people. However, some pragmatic skills are appropriate in adults and in children with better language skills. In this regard, theory of mind competence is important to develop some pragmatic abilities, but it seems that structural language level predicts most of the pragmatic skills within ASD. Nevertheless, there are few assessment instruments to have a global measure of pragmatic skills of a child, and usually they assess expressive but not receptive abilities. In this sense, digital tools reduce social and linguistic demands as they provide a multimodal environment.

So, the first aim of the present study is to find out if PleaseApp (a novel digital assessment of receptive pragmatics) is an adequate instrument to measure age-appropriate pragmatic skills in children with ASD (with and without structural language difficulties). Moreover, the second aim is to study which are the best predictors of receptive pragmatic competence within the ASD group.

A group of children with ASD and a group of children with typical development (TD) aged 5-12 years were recruited. The ASD group was divided into two subgroups: ASD with language disorder (ASD+LD) and ASD without language disorder (ASD-LD). Their receptive pragmatic skills were assessed with PleaseApp, which allows to evaluate eight receptive pragmatic skills: figurative language; narrative; reference; indirect speech; humor; gesture-speech integration; politeness; and complex intentionality. Furthermore, the participants were assessed with structural language and theory of mind measures.

Between-group comparisons showed a lower performance of both ASD groups in comparison to the TD group in the general receptive pragmatic score. Moreover, results revealed a lower performance of the group ASD+LD in seven out of the eight pragmatic components, but only in two components when compared to the ASD-LD group. Furthermore, when comparing ASD subgroups, a lower performance of ASD+LD participants was observed both in the general pragmatic score and in four pragmatic components. Correlational analyses within TD group revealed that pragmatic competence was significantly associated with age, structural language and theory of mind, whereas within ASD group it was only significantly associated with structural language. Additionally, predictive analyses within TD group confirmed that the general pragmatic score was mostly predicted by age, whereas within ASD group was mainly predicted by structural language level of participants.

Our results revealed that PleaseApp was a good tool both to find differences between the TD group and the ASD groups with the general pragmatic score, and also to find specific difficulties of the participants with ASD with lower structural language skills. In this sense, our results expand the evidence that some areas of pragmatics are age-appropriate in children with ASD and better structural language skills. In addition, structural language predicted pragmatic performance within the ASD group. So, this finding supports that structural language skills are important to develop most of pragmatic dimensions, above all in children with neurodevelopmental disorders such as ASD.

It is concluded that Pleaseapp provides useful information in the educational field to plan subsequent interventions adapted to the real pragmatic difficulties of each child.

Keywords: Digital tool, pragmatics, autism, autistic spectrum disorder (ASD), structural language, education, assessment.