Paper Title
Pragmatic Judgment Abilities in Adolescents

Abstract
Pragmatics direct us on how communication is initiated and understood during a conversation. Though Pragmatic skills appear at a very young age, it shows significant changes as the child transitions through childhood to adolescence till they are finally able to perform complex social function. The study aims to profile pragmatic judgment abilities in typically developing adolescents. A cross sectional study was carried out by adopting non randomized sampling technique. The study was conducted on 120 typically developing adolescents across the age range of 10-16 years. A stimuli was formulated to profile the judgment based pragmatic abilities in adolescents. Detailed analysis revealed a developmental trend across the age range for pragmatic skills. There was a statistically significant difference between groups as determined by one-way ANOVA (F(5,114) = 4.83, p = .000). In the present study it is observed that the adolescent’s abilities to judge various pragmatic abilities underwent subtle and gradual development changes. The lower grades had poorer performances in comparison to adolescents from higher grades. As children and adolescents grow and mature, their perceptions of others improve, along with their ability to identify the complexity of contentious topics and to resolve differing points of view Keywords - Pragmatics, Judgement, Adolescent