Children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) use to have pragmatic difficulties, which is a barrier for their participation in a variety of daily communicative activities, both at school and at home. Detecting which specific pragmatic skills are affected is essential to improve them in an appropriate manner. In this sense, PleaseApp is a digital instrument for the assessment and training of pragmatics, that can identify and improve strengths and weaknesses of different receptive pragmatic skills. It has been designed following Universal Design for Learning guidelines, such as multimodality and motivation. Moreover, active inclusion of parents of the children in the intervention has been seen as a significant mediator of intervention effect of social communication programs for children with NDD.

In this sense, a method using a digital tool to improve pragmatic skills in children with NDD is proposed involving the parents of the child. PleaseApp is a digital tool designed to assess and improve receptive pragmatic skills in children aged 5 to 12. It addresses eight components of pragmatics: figurative language, narrative, reference, indirect speech-acts, humour, speech-gesture integration, politeness and complex intentionality. The tool offers assessment screens to establish a baseline in each dimension, identifying strengths and difficulties. After that, the child will play in the intervention screens. On each screen, there are forced choice options and when the answer is correct, the child is awarded a star. In contrast, when the answer is incorrect, the child is given a clue to find the correct one and is encouraged to answer again. Furthermore, a guide has been created to transfer and generalize those learnings and progress with PleaseApp. This guide has general information about pragmatic skills and different modules about the pragmatic dimensions. It offers strategies and activities for parents to use to support their child’s pragmatic skills. In this sense, the manual also reflects specific recommendations and strategies according to the disorder of the child (e.g. autism) and good communication practices as a family.

The resulting method has two phases. As a first phase, a professional (e.g. speech and language therapist) must conduct the intervention sessions with PleaseApp. The areas to train will be detected with the assessment route, and then they will be encouraged to play with the intervention route to enhance those areas. Professionals will accompany the children during the sessions to check if there are accessibility or understanding problems. As a second phase, parents of the child will be explained and given a manual (guide) created to transfer and generalize the capacities learnt and following good practices. The manual has general information about pragmatic skills and describes strategies for parents to use to support their child’s skills.

It is concluded that combining digital tools and the inclusion of the family is essential to transfer the learning of new communication skills to different contexts. In this sense, using PleaseApp during individual sessions by a professional provides a motivating and engaging environment to practice those pragmatic skills where the child finds more difficulty. Moreover, parents’ responsiveness is crucial to target infants' social communication skills, and it is important to offer them resources to reinforce these learnings and transfer them to different everyday contexts.

Keywords: Pragmatics, digital method, intervention, neurodevelopmental disorders, parents.