The 'dice' game: a new test of pragmatic language skills after closed-head injury.
There are few clinical tools available to assess communication skills following closed-head injury. This paper describes one such task in which the subject is required to explain a board game to a naive listener. The explanation is taped, transcribed and the content is quantified. Reliability studies demonstrated that the test can be consistently scored. A group of 43 normal subjects was investigated, and some variation in performance according to age and educational background was revealed. A group of 20 brain-injured male adults with executive-type deficits were then compared to a matched subgroup of the controls. The clinical group produced less essential information and relatively more unnecessary information than their non-brain-damaged counterparts. Qualitative features of discourse disorganization were also revealed.
McDonald
S
S
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Australia.
Pearce
S
S
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001037:Aphasia / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001925:Brain Damage, Chronic / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology*; D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D015588:Observer Variation; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011594:Psychometrics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*