Evaluation of a New Adolescent Social Communication Assessment: The Transition Pragmatics Interview

This study evaluated the psychometric functioning of a new criterion-referenced assessment of adolescent social communication, the Transition Pragmatics Interview (TPI), based on the synthesis model of pragmatics. Two ways of interpreting item difficulty were explored: (a) as a function of the synthesis model elements of social communication ability that items were designed to assess, and (b) as a function of the developmental level required for a successful response based on an adapted situational-discourse-semantics (SDS) model (Norris & Hoffman, 1993).