Adolescents with traumatic brain injury: Assessing pragmatic language function

This paper reviews aspects of assessment of pragmatic language function in adolescents who suffer a traumatic brain injury (TBI). First, the nature of the injuries and the communication disturbances seen with TBI are described. It is argued that such communication disturbances are a result of the impact of impaired cognitive processes upon basic language abilities, especially those cognitive processes to do with frontal lobe function and executive control. Secondly, a number of theoretical approaches to the assessment of pragmatic language are reviewed as they have been applied to adult traumatically brain-injured subjects. One approach has been discourse analyses focusing on local and global coherence of monologues produced under standard conditions. A second has been the use of a speech act framework to analyse the production and comprehension of social inference to meet specific social contextual requirements. A battery designed to assess pragmatic language function incorporating these approaches is described, and the preliminary results of its application to traumatically brain-injured adolescents are discussed.