Purpose: This study was designed to compare the pragmatic abilities of children and adolescents who suffered a traumatic brain injury to their non-injured age matched peers.
Methods: Participants were put into four groups (adolescent TBI, adolescent control group, child TBI, and child control group). The TBI groups sustained a moderate head injury between two and four years prior to the study and were no longer receiving speech therapy. Each participant engaged in the conversational assessment of Damico’s Clinical Discourse Analysis. Results of the TBI groups were compared to their respective control group to calculate deviance in terms of pragmatic impairment.
Introduction
Both the childhood and adolescent years are important times in an individual’s emotional and social development, especially interacting with others and forming friendships. A traumatic brain injury (TBI) disturbs this socialization, as it affects a child’s ability to use social language when communicating with others (Ross, McMillan, Kelly, Sumpter, & Dorris, 2011). These …show more content…
Revision Behaviors (R): The speaker tends to start speaking and backtrack again, interrupting themselves, with multiple attempts to communicate their idea.
3. Delays Before Responding (DR): The speaker exhibits long pauses before responding to questions.
4. Failure to Structure Discourse (DS): The individual fails to organize thoughts prior to communicating content and ideas. As a result, listeners are unable to follow the discourse.
5. Turn-Taking Difficulty (TTD): During conversation, the participant does not follow social rules for taking conversational turns. The participant either speaks too often or fails to hold up conversation.
6. Gaze Inefficiency (GI): The individual uses inconsistent or unusual eye contact with their conversational partner.
7. Inappropriate Intonational Contour (IC): The speaker is unable to convey meaning to their speech by changing pitch levels, inflectional contours and vocal