Neuropragmatics: Extralinguistic Communication after Closed Head Injury

Abstract

This work is concerned with the decay of communicative abilities after head trauma. A protocol composed of 16 videotaped scenes was devised in order to investigate the comprehension of several types of communicative actions realized with extralinguistic means, like pointing or clapping. The protocol was administered to 30 closed-head-injured individuals. The results showed that performance decreased from simple standard acts to complex standard acts, deceits, and ironies. The subjects' performance was worse with the scenes reproducing failing, rather than successful, communicative actions. The results are compared with those we previously obtained with a linguistic protocol. A theory of the cognitive processes underlying intentional communication is outlined and used to explain the results.

Operative and nonoperative linguistic outcomes in brain injury patients

“…In this population, comprehension and production of linguistic macrostructures are disturbed [4,5]. The available reports about impairment in pragmatic level of language after head trauma are more related to extralinguistic and paralinguistic facets [6][7][8][9]. Post-trauma linguistic disorder is accompanied by deficit in some cognitive skills including problem solving, working memory, and executive functions [10][11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment

“…The convenience in adopting such framework is that it offers a useful theoretical base on which to explain communicative deficits in patients with TBI. 4,5 According to the theory, a communication act can be conveyed through different modalities-words, gestures, body movements, and facial expressions-which should be intended as different means for expressing the same communication competence. [50][51][52] One of the relevant aspects of the theory, useful for the purposes of the present research, is that communication is conceived as a process that requires different steps of elaboration.…”

Evaluating the causes of impaired irony comprehension following traumatic brain injury

“…Indeed, it is possible that both ToM deficits and pragmatic deficits are underpinned by more basic impairments to inference making that affect not only mental inferences (i.e., ToM), but also non-mental (or physical) inferences. Many of the studies investigating the presence of ToM in TBI do not include non-mental inference stories as control stories (e.g., Bara, Cutica, & Tirassa, 2001;Dennis et al, 2001b;Santoro & Spiers, 1994) and, certainly, all studies examining the contribution of ToM to irony comprehension to date (Happe, 1993;Martin & McDonald, 2004;Winner et al, 1998) have neglected to control adequately for non-mental inferences. This is an important limitation to the ToM account of irony comprehension, as it has been well established that non-mental inferential reasoning ability is commonly impaired following TBI (Lezak, 1995) and this has been shown to contribute to pragmatic language processes even when ToM is not required (e.g., ambiguous advertisements; Pearce et al, 1998).…”