image: PleaseApp, an app designed to assess and treat pragmatic and social communication skills in children aged 5 to 12, developed by researchers at the Universitat Jaume I in Castelló (UJI) and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), is now available in the Hogrefe TEA Ediciones catalogue. This innovative digital tool is aimed at psychology and speech therapy professionals and other psychoeducational specialists who work with children with neurodevelopmental disorders, especially those with pragmatic and social communication difficulties. Thanks to its interactive activities set in everyday contexts such as the zoo, the cinema, or the beach, the programme allows for an accurate assessment of how children understand and use language in social situations.
Credit: UJI-UOC-Hogrefe TEA Ediciones
PleaseApp, an app designed to assess and treat pragmatic and social communication skills in children aged 5 to 12, developed by researchers at the Universitat Jaume I in Castelló (UJI) and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), is now available in the Hogrefe TEA Ediciones catalogue.
This innovative digital tool is aimed at psychology and speech therapy professionals and other psychoeducational specialists who work with children with neurodevelopmental disorders, especially those with pragmatic and social communication difficulties. Thanks to its interactive activities set in everyday contexts such as the zoo, the cinema, or the beach, the programme allows for an accurate assessment of how children understand and use language in social situations.
“This innovative method provides a specific or dynamic perspective on the child's abilities and, therefore, useful information for planning subsequent interventions tailored to their real needs in the educational setting”, explain UJI researchers Clara Andrés and Raquel Flores, and UOC researcher Alfonso Igualada.
It is organised into two complementary itineraries: one for assessment, which provides an initial profile of strengths and weaknesses in different areas of pragmatics, and another for intervention, which offers activities tailored to specific needs to promote progress in less developed areas. An excerpt from the manual and an interview with the research team that developed it can be found on the Hogrefe TEA Ediciones website.
The app has been tested with children (with and without neurodevelopmental disorders) and has made it possible to detect whether the child has age-appropriate pragmatic and social communication skills, as well as to specify what particular problems they have at eight different levels of comprehension: figurative language, narrative structures, expressions of reference, verbal and visual humor, complex communicative intent, and interpretation of indirect speech acts; integration of gestures with speech and appropriate use of polite expressions.
One of the main contributions of PleaseApp is its integrative view of multiple skills linked to the development of pragmatics in childhood. In addition, it has been designed in an attractive and interactive digital format to increase the motivation of those being assessed and facilitate its implementation by professionals. Another contribution is that it allows for the direct assessment of comprehension skills in the field of language pragmatics.
Articles
Andrés-Roqueta, C., Flores-Buils, R., & Igualada, A. (2024). Validation of PleaseApp: A digital tool for the assessment of receptive pragmatic abilities in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15, 1–18.
Andrés-Roqueta, C., Flores-Buils, R., & Igualada, A. (2025). PleaseApp: Assessment and intervention in pragmatics. Hogrefe TEA Ediciones.
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
People