Pragmatic abilities in children with Brain Neoplasm: Assessment and analysis using the Assessment Battery for Communication

Introduction Brain Neoplasms (BNs)1 are Acquired Brain Injuries (ABIs). In BNs, lesions are caused by a neoplastic mass and by the adverse sequelae of radio- and chemo-therapy. Childhood’s ABIs have an impact on cognitive functions and pragmatics that usually persists over years. A lack of validated tools to assess pragmatics of children with ABIs is reported. The existing tests mainly investigate the linguistic component, without exhaustively assessing other expressive means. The aim of this study is to analyse pragmatic ability of children with BNs. This study is part of a wider project aimed at investigating pragmatic and cognitive abilities of children with ABIs. Methods Study design: cross-sectional study. The clinical group (BNs) consists of 13 children with BNs aged 6 to 16 years, matched by age and sex with a group of Typically Developing (TD) children. Pragmatics is assessed by the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo2,3) children version, a validated assessment tool composed by 5 scales (i.e., conversation, context, paralinguistic, linguistic and extralinguistic), which assess a wide range of pragmatic phenomena in both comprehension and production. Preliminary Results The Mann Whitney U test shows that there is a statistically significant difference in the performance of the two groups on the ABaCo total score (U=132.00; z=2.442; p=.014; r=.479) with BNs performing worse than TD. Mann Whitney U tests highlight a statistically significant difference in the performance of the two groups on paralinguistic (U=134.50; z=2.620; p=.009; r=.514) and extralinguistic scale (U=125.00; z=2.093; p=0.39; r=.410), with BNs performing lower than TD, but not on linguistic (U=100.50; z=.830; p=.418; r=.163) and contextual scale (U=90.00; z=.307; p=.801; r=.060). The difference on conversational scale was just above the threshold for statistical significance (U=122.00; z=2.271; p=.057; r=.445). Conclusions Preliminary results confirm the presence of pragmatic difficulties in children with BNs. In particular, difficulties on paralinguistic and extralinguistic scale underline the need to evaluate various means of pragmatic expression, other than language, in order to detect more precisely the difficulties of children with BNs and thus plan efficient rehabilitation program. A larger sample is needed in order to generalize these findings.