Citation

Angeleri R, Bosco FM, Zettin M, Sacco K, Colle L, Bara BG. Brain Lang. 2008; 107(3): 229-245.

Affiliation

Center for Cognitive Science and Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Via Po 14, 10123 Turin, Italy.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, Academic Press)

DOI

10.1016/j.bandl.2008.01.002

PMID

18267340

Abstract

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.

Language: en