Communication deficits: assessment of subjects with frontal lobe damage in an interview setting

Abstract

This paper is about communication deficits in an interview setting among adolescents with frontal lobe damage. One of the predominant characteristics of these patients is difficulty taking the context into account. Pragmatic theories, which attempt to clarify the link between the formal structure of language and the extra‐linguistic context (such as the interlocutor's characteristics or strategies), may help provide insight into the difficulties of these patients. An interview setting, viewed here as a communication situation, is governed by an interaction format based on specific cooperative principles. In this study, the results of subjects with frontal lobe damage (in the role of interviewee) were first compared with those of normal subjects in an interview situation. Three pragmatic indexes were considered: the number of utterances per speaking turn (speech quantity), amount of digression (keeping to the topic or predefined subject of conversation shared by the interlocutors) and prevalence of withinsubject contingency speaking turns without an intervening remark by the interviewer (topic development). Secondly, we attempted to determine whether the patients’ discourse was dependent upon the interviewer's conversational strategy (structured, non‐structured, or alternating). The results clearly point out the extent of the difficulty frontal lobe patients have conforming to the rules of the interview situation, whether regarding the amount of speech they produce or their ability to keep within and/or development of the topic of conversation. The data also indicated that the patients’ linguistic productions varied with the interviewer's strategy. The structured strategy did not always give rise to the best performance: while the unstructured and alternating strategies allowed patients to produce more utterances per speaking turn, the alternating strategy enabled better development of the interview topic. These results suggest that such variations could be put to fruitful use in remedial techniques.

The role of executive functions in the pragmatic skills of children age 4–5

“…This result could, at first glance, appear to be counter intuitive since EF should logically assist children with their PS rather than being detrimental to them. Nevertheless, our data are consistent with findings showing an excessive increase in talkativeness among individuals who likely have an inhibition deficit, such as children with ADHD (Landau and Milich, 1988; Humphries et al, 1994; Bruce et al, 2006) and patients with frontal lesions (Bernicot and Dardier, 2001). Arbuckle et al (2000) revealed a more direct link between low inhibitory control and the tendency to provide more redundant information and be more talkative (marginally significant) among older adults (63–95 years) in a referential communication task.…”

Conversational turn-taking in adults with acquired brain injury

“…First, if adults with ABI make incorrect predictions about speakers' utterances, they could take a turn at the right time but produce the wrong content. Narrative content errors have been the subject of several previous studies of adults with TBI (e.g., Angeleri et al, 2008;Bernicot & Dardier, 2001;Coelho, Youse, Le, & Feinn, 2003;Ehrlich & Barry, 1989), although the interaction of predictability and content has not yet been studied in this population. Second, if adults with ABI were either slow or unable to make predictions, their turn latencies would be longer.…”