Communicative impairment in traumatic brain injury: A complete pragmatic assessment

The aim of (lie 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. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.