PURPOSE: To evaluate the pragmatic abilities of a group of hearing impaired children, and compare them with normal-listener peers. METHODS: Case-control study composed by 32 children of both genders with ages between two and six years, paired by age: 16 hearing impaired with moderately severe to profound hearing loss without other organic dysfunctions (cases), and 16 children with normal hearing with no Speech-Language Pathology complaints (control). The evaluation and analysis of pragmatic abilities were carried out based on the ABFW-Pragmatics Test, following instructions of its own protocol. RESULTS: The average age of the studied children was four years (SD=1,3); there was a significant difference between cases and controls regarding the number of communicative acts per minute (p=0,001). The hearing impaired children presented fewer communicative initiatives than normal listeners, and the gestural communicative mean was used by 13 (81.3%) of the first group and by five (32.2%) of the latter (p=0,004). There was no difference between the groups regarding communicative intentions (p=0,465). CONCLUSION: The hearing impaired children were able to interact in contextualized situations using communicative functions similar to the listeners, and differed from them in the most used communicative mean.