The present study was designed to examine the pragmatic language functions used by school-age children during a structured dialogue. The structured dialogue consisted of a question-answer paradigm. Seven different questions were asked of each subject. A taxonomy consisting of ten categories was developed for the purpose of classifying the subjects' responses to the questions. The taxonomy was found to be effective in two ways: 1) the number of categories was sufficient to handle the subjects' responses to questions and 2) the interscorer reliability of the independent judges using the taxonomy was high. Results indicate the existence of both similarities and differences in the way school-age children answer questions during a structured dialogue.
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