Browsing by Author "Abd-El Rahim, Safa"

Background and goals: Pragmatic skills refer to the ability to use and understand language appropriately in various communication situations and environments. Mastery of pragmatic skills requires high-level cognitive abilities, especially working memory, theory of mind, and the ability to regulate actions. Immersive virtual reality is a technology that creates a convincing or realitysimulating three-dimensional and interactive world, providing users with a sense of presence through multimodal components. In this master's thesis, the connection between the pragmatic skills of school-age children and performance in an immersive virtual reality task was examined. The study can help evaluate the applicability of an immersive virtual reality task in assessing pragmatic skills. Subjects and method: Ten participants were typically developing Finnish speaking children aged 7 to 9 years. Children's pragmatic skills were assessed using the CCC-2 Questionnaire, the CELF-5 Pragmatic Activities Checklist and the CELF-5 Pragmatic Profile, as well as the false belief tasks of the Pragma Test, and were examined in three different domains: non-linguistic skills, context-dependent comprehension skills, as well as language use skills. In addition, the children completed a virtual reality task using virtual reality glasses, in which the task was to focus their gaze on visually and sound-cued objects and listen to the things told about them. The relationship between pragmatic skills and performance in the virtual reality task (duration of task completion, number of interruptions) were statistically analyzed and correlation coefficients between variables were calculated using Spearman's correlation coefficient and partial correlation coefficient. Main results and reflection: Regarding context-dependent comprehension skills, a statistically significant relationship was found between linguistic structural mastery and performance in the virtual reality task at the first level of the task. No other statistically significant relationships were found between pragmatic skills of typically developing school-aged children and performance in the virtual reality task in this study. Based on the results, linguistic structural mastery, which is part of context-dependent comprehension skills, may be associated with performance in the virtual reality task. Generalizing the results is limited by the small sample size. The results are consistent with previous research and support previous notions of the role of linguistic structural mastery in pragmatic skills and the suitability of virtual reality as a clinical assessment method. Further research with a larger sample size and broader use of immersive virtual reality in assessing pragmatic skills is needed.