PraBat: An item response theory-based test battery to assess individual differences in pragmatic abilities in preschool children from different cultural backgrounds

Pragmatic abilities allow us to use and comprehend language in interaction. The assessment of individual differences in pragmatic abilities, both within and across cultural settings, is crucial to understanding how they develop. However, tools with good psychometric properties that suit this purpose are lacking. The current study describes the creation of a test battery assessing individual differences in 3- to 6-year-old children from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The battery is implemented as a tablet-based game, administrable both online and in person. Children are prompted by a character with one or multiple utterances and respond by selecting a picture among three options on a screen. An initial larger item pool was piloted in Germany and Kenya to ensure the items’ cross-cultural adaptability. We then used item response modeling on a sample of 713 German children to select items that varied in difficulty and fit the Rasch model. The so-constructed 19-item battery shows excellent model fit, test-retest reliability and convergent validity. The way the battery was created allows for easy cross-cultural adaptation, easy administration and scoring, thereby addressing an important gap in the developmental study of the interplay between social cognition and language. All materials and code are freely accessible to interested researchers. The task can be used via the following website: https://devpsy.web.leuphana.de/prabat/.