Florit Pons, JúliaPronina, MariiaIgualada, AlfonsoPrieto Vives, Pilar, 1965-Norbury, Courtenay2025-11-182025-11-182025Florit-Pons J, Pronina M, Igualada A, Prieto P, Norbury C. Multimodal skills, but not motor skills, predict narrative and expressive pragmatic skills in children with typical development and neurodevelopmental disorders. Child Dev. 2025 Sep-Oct;96(5):1807-24. DOI: 10.1111/cdev.700150009-3920http://hdl.handle.net/10230/71926To 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.application/pdfeng© 2025 The Author(s). Child Development published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Research in Child Development. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.info:eu-repo/semantics/article2025-11-18http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cdev.70015Motor skillsMultimodal accuracyNarrative and pragmatic skillsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess