Multimodal skills, but not motor skills, predict narrative and expressive pragmatic skills in children with typical development and neurodevelopmental disorders

Abstract

To see whether communicative-based multimodal skills (compared to non-communicative motor skills) predicted complex language skills, this study examined the predictive power of multimodal and motor skills on narrative and expressive pragmatic abilities across two groups. Participants were children with typical development (N=88, Mage=5.34, 48% female) and with neurodevelopmental disorders (N = 51, Mage = 5.01, 25% female) mostly of white ethnicity (86.3%). We evaluated children's multimodal accuracy, motor skills, core language skills, and narrative and pragmatic skills. Results revealed that, in all groups, both multimodal skills and core language significantly predicted narrative (R2 = 0.569) and pragmatic skills (R2 = 0.621), while motor skills did not. These findings highlight the relevance of multimodality in the assessment of children's complex language skills.