Communicative impairment in traumatic brain injury: a complete pragmatic assessment.
The aim of the present study was to examine the communicative abilities of traumatic brain injury patients (TBI). We wish to provide a complete assessment of their communicative ability/disability using a new experimental protocol, the Assessment Battery of Communication, (ABaCo) comprising five scales--linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic, context and conversational--which investigate all the main pragmatic elements involved in a communicative exchange. The ABaCo was administered to 21 TBI subjects and to a control group. The results showed that performance by TBI patients was worse than that of controls on all scales; moreover they showed a trend of increasing difficulty in understanding and producing different pragmatic phenomena, i.e., standard communication acts, deceits and ironies, whether such phenomena are expressed through the linguistic or extralinguistic modality.
Angeleri
R
R
Center for Cognitive Science and Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Via Po 14, 10123 Turin, Italy.
Bosco
F M
FM
Zettin
M
M
Sacco
K
K
Colle
L
L
Bara
B G
BG
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001930:Brain Injuries / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult