Pragmatic Communication Disorder clinical trials

Pragmatic Abilities in Children With Acquired Brain Injury

Although neuroplasticity of the brain is high in childhood, some neuropsychological sequelae could persist over the long term in children with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI). Many children with TBI, show deficits in pragmatic abilities that usually persist. Pragmatic difficulties have been observed also in children with sequelae of brain neoplasms . The lack of validated assessment tools for this population is described in literature. This limit is also valid for the tests that assess pragmatic abilities. The tests that SLPs usually administer investigate only the comprehension of verbal pragmatic and, sometimes the comprehension of linguistic and emotional prosody as well. This could lead to the risk that, sometimes, some pragmatic abilities might not be included in the evaluation. Moreover, it leads to a harder definition of the treatment aims and a harder objective demonstration of treatment outcomes. For these reasons, it is important to use an assessment tool that provides information on all the pragmatic abilities, not only in input but also in output. Some Italian researchers, recently, developed a test that investigates all these areas. It is called "ABaCo", and it is based on the Cognitive Pragmatics Theory. This theory is focused on cognitive processes underlying human communication. This test is standardized on a normative group of 300 adults. It was developed with the aim of assessing pragmatic abilities in adults with brain injuries. The assessor shows short videos to the patient, and he/her has to complete or understand the interaction transmitted through different communication channels. The authors also created an adaptation of this test for children aged 5 to 8.6 years old, modifying some items. After that, they administered this adaptation of the test to 390 healthy children. In another study, the authors administered this version of the batteries to children with autism spectrum disorders and to a control group of healthy children, matched by age and sex. Considering all the studies that already exist for the application of this assessment tool in childhood and adolescence, and the perspective of a standardization for developmental ages, this study aims to investigate whether this test could be useful to detect pragmatic difficulties also in children with ABI.