Psychometric aspects of verbal pragmatic ratings

This study examined the psychometric aspects of a verbal pragmatic rating s cale. The scale contained six pragmatic features (i.e., Conciseness, Lexica l Selection, Quantity, Relevancy, Specificity, and Topic Maintenance) based on Grice's cooperative principles. Fifteen right brain-damaged (RBD), 15 l eft brain-damaged (LBD), and 16 healthy normal control (NC) right-handed ad ult participants produced narratives while recollecting emotional and nonem otional experiences. Naive raters evaluated each pragmatic feature for appr opriateness on a 5-point Likert scale. When reliability was examined, the o verall internal consistency of the pragmatic scale was extremely high (alph a = .96). Factor analysis was conducted to examine the theoretical relation s among the six pragmatic features. Three meaningful factors involving disc ourse content, conceptual unity, and parsimony were identified. Findings ar e discussed in light of Grice's model and the construct validity of the sca le. (C) 1999 Academic Press.