Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment: A Rehabilitative Program for Traumatic Brain Injury Individuals

Objective: To verify the efficacy of Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment (CPT), a new rehabilitation training program for improving communicative-pragmatic abilities. Design: The CPT program consists of 24 group sessions, concerned with improving several communication modalities, theory of mind (ToM), and cognitive components that can affect pragmatic performance, such as awareness and executive functions. Participants: A sample of 15 adults with severe traumatic brain injury. Main Measures: Improvements were evaluated before and after training, using the equivalent forms of the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), a tool for evaluating comprehension and production of a wide range of pragmatic phenomena. A neuropsychological and ToM assessment was also conducted. Results: The patients' performance improved after training, in terms of both comprehension and production, in all the communication modalities assessed by the ABaCo, that is, linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic, and social appropriateness abilities. The follow-up showed that the improvement of patients persists after 3 months from the end of the training. Conclusions: The results suggest that the CPT program is efficacious in improving communicative-pragmatic abilities in individuals with TBI, and that improvements at this level are still detectable even in chronic patients years after the injury.