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.