Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.elsevier.com/copyright

No abstract

No abstract

The Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo) was introduced to evaluate pragmatic abilities in patients with cerebral lesions. In the present study we present normative data for individuals aged 15-75 (N = 300). The sample was stratified by age, sex and years of education, according to ISTAT (Italian National Institute of Statistics) indications in order to be representative of the general national population. As performance on the ABaCo decreases with age and lower years of education, the norms were stratified for both age and education.The ABaCo is a valuable tool in clinical practice; the normative data provided here will enable clinicians to determine different kinds and specific levels of communicative impairments more precisely. The assessment of pragmatic abilities emerged as a central issue in the evaluation of patients with communicative impairments and related disorders in the early 1980s (e.g., Prutting, 1982), and the influence of pragmatic variables in treatment plans and goals has been more fully appreciated in the last 30 years. Pragmatic ability refers to a wide range of communicative behaviors concerning the way language is used in context to convey meanings (Adams, 2002;Bates, 1976; Kempson, 1975), and in the population of individuals with cerebral lesions, numerous patients have been found to have difficulties that lie principally with pragmatics. Patients typically show poor turn-taking skills and difficulty with topic maintenance, have problems understanding discourse and non-literal meanings, and may find it difficult to interpret subtle meanings or idiomatic statements and make knowledge-based inferences in social scripts (e.g., Dennis & Barnes, 1990; Friedland & Miller, 1998; McDonald, 1993). Moreover, people with brain injury often demonstrate normal basic linguistic skills, but have difficulty adapting their communication to specific ABACO -NORMATIVE DATA 4 contexts (e.g., different social situations or different communicative partners) and managing complex pragmatic phenomena, such as irony and deceit (Angeleri et al., 2008;Bara, Tirassa, & Zettin, 1997; Cutica, Bucciarelli, & Bara, 2006). The recognition of pragmatic components as a crucial feature in rehabilitation programs thus led to the need to deal with the pervasiveness of these communicative disorders and the consequent social isolation suffered by brain-injured individuals. Importantly, in a two-year follow-up study, Snow, Douglas, and Ponsford (1998) showed that pragmatic disorders do not spontaneously improve over time, providing evidence that communicative difficulties do not resolve as a consequence of recovery over time or speech-language input. These findings suggest that careful efforts should be made to identify and manage pragmatic disorders early on following brain injury. Finally, normative data offer the opportunity to operationalize pragmatic functioning within a normal range, and obtain a precise evaluation of domains of impairment, a crucial step in planning clinical pathways of recovery. ABaCo -As...

In this paper we present a new hypothesis on the evolution of autistic-like and schizotypal personality traits. We argue that autistic-like and schizotypal traits contribute in opposite ways to individual differences in reproductive and mating strategies, and have been maintained – at least in part – by sexual selection through mate choice. Whereas positive schizotypy can be seen as a psychological phenotype oriented to high-mating effort and good genes displays in both sexes, autistic-like traits in their non-pathological form contribute to a male-typical strategy geared toward high parental investment, low-mating effort, and long-term resource allocation. At the evolutionary-genetic level, this sexual selection hypothesis is consistent with Crespi and Badcock's “imprinted brain” theory of autism and psychosis; the effect of offspring mating behavior on resource flow within the family connects sexual selection with genomic imprinting in the context of human biparental care. We conclude by presenting the results of an empirical study testing one of the predictions derived from our hypothesis. In a sample of 199 college students, autistic-like traits predicted lower interest in short-term mating, higher partner-specific investment, and stronger commitment to long-term romantic relations, whereas positive schizotypy showed the opposite pattern of effects.