Communicative impairment in traumatic brain injury: A complete pragmatic assessment

Assessment battery for communication (ABaCo): normative data

“…The ABaCo (Sacco et al, 2008) is a 180-item battery focused on pragmatic assessment: 72 items were based on the examiner's prompt using a tester-participant dialogue format in order to create interactive situations eliciting specific communicative behaviors in a natural way, and 108 on video-taped scenes each lasting 20-25 seconds. The battery assessed both comprehension and production abilities; in particular, the video-taped scenes assessing the comprehension side showed two actors involved in a communicative interaction which participants had to understand, while the scenes assessing production showed a communicative interaction which participants had to complete with an appropriate communication act.…”

“…Furthermore, the ABaCo has been shown to have good construct validity, high inter-rater agreement and good internal consistency (Sacco et al, 2008).…”

“…The ABaCo has been used for research purposes in a number of sample groups with certain medical conditions, such as traumatic brain injury patients (Angeleri et al, 2008), proving to be a useful tool for identifying communicative deficits in individuals with neuropsychological disorders. Furthermore, the ABaCo has been shown to have good construct validity, high inter-rater agreement and good internal consistency (Sacco et al, 2008).…”

“…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.…”

“…The Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo;Sacco et al, 2008) is a clinical tool for evaluating pragmatic abilities in patients with brain injury or other neuropsychological disturbances. The purpose of this paper is to provide normative data in order to clarify and quantify communicative impairments resulting from various kinds of cerebral lesions.…”