34

This paper reports on advances in pragmatic language processing. Pragmatic language refers to one or more statements that require pragmatic skills to be understood: going beyond what the speaker seems to be saying by considering various elements of the conversational context. In children, these pragmatic skills are predictive of the quality of future social relationships, and it is therefore relevant to assess them and even support them. However, data on the development of these skills remain scarce today and there are few assessment tools available, even though in recent decades, researchers have observed pragmatic deficits or pragmatic difficulties in many disorders, acquired or developmental. Some kinds of pragmatic language, such as irony, constitute promising avenues for assessing diverse pragmatic skills. This overview includes some recommendations for the construction of a developmental battery for assessing pragmatic language and shows, through two experimental studies, that the explanatory variables of pragmatic difficulties may differ partly according to the developmental disorder.