Communicative Ability in Schizophrenic Patients: Executive Function, Theory of Mind and Mental Re... more Communicative Ability in Schizophrenic Patients: Executive Function, Theory of Mind and Mental Representations Marianna Vallana (vallana@psych.unito.it) 1 Francesca M. Bosco (bosco@psych.unito.it) 1 Romina Angeleri (angeleri@psych.unito.it) 1 Katiuscia Sacco (sacco@psych.unito.it) 1,2 Bruno G. Bara (bruno.bara@psych.unito.it) 1 Livia Colle (colle@psych.unito.it) 1 Center for Cognitive Science and Department of Psychology, University and Polytechnic of Turin via Po 14, Turin, Italy Ospedale Koelliker, corso Galileo Ferraris 251-255, Turin, Italy articulated differentiation between different pragmatic phenomena but, in our view, they underestimate the role of specific mental cognitive processes, namely the complexity of mental representations in explaining schizophrenic’s communicative ability. The present research is an exploratory investigation aimed at clarifying how the ability to deal with sophisticated mental representations can explain communicative deficits in schizophrenic pa...
Human communication is one of the most complex social activity: it is a process of meaning constr... more Human communication is one of the most complex social activity: it is a process of meaning construction which cooperatively involves all participants taking part in the interaction. Various clinical conditions may lead to impairments of communicative abilities: developmental disorders (e.g., autism, specific language impairment, Down syndrome), brain pathologies (e.g., closed head injury, right hemisphere damage, aphasia), psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia), disorders of old age (e.g. dementia). The assessment of a patient’s abilities and disabilities is the crucial starting point for planning an efficient rehabilitation path, where residual capacities are strengthen and, whenever possible, impaired components are restored. However, while the phonological, syntactic and semantic components of language can be assessed by numerous tests, instruments for the evaluation of pragmatic aspects of communication are scarce (see Sacco et al., 2008 for a more detailed analysis of the existi...
Lo studio indaga il ruolo della ToM nel comprendere atti comunicativi di diversa complessita. Si ... more Lo studio indaga il ruolo della ToM nel comprendere atti comunicativi di diversa complessita. Si sono somministrati item della Batteria di Assessment per la Comunicazione e test ToM a 120 bambini (3-8 anni). I dati mostrano trend di difficolta crescente nel gestire i diversi compiti pragmatici e una correlazione tra ToM e performance pragmatiche; tuttavia, la sola ToM non spiega la varianza dei risultati, meglio spiegata dalla crescente complessita inferenziale sottostante i compiti pragmatici.
Pragmatics and its Interfaces as related to the Expression of Intention, 2019
Theory of Mind (ToM) is a neurocognitive system that allows the perceiver to attribute mental sta... more Theory of Mind (ToM) is a neurocognitive system that allows the perceiver to attribute mental states, such as intentions, beliefs, or feelings, to others’ actions. The aim of the present work is to analyse the engagement of the ToM system in communication, in particular, in communicative intention processing. To this aim, we propose an Intention Processing Network (IPN) with its own principles and mechanisms, that is, a brain network differentially engaged according to the complex intertwining of the context, goal, and action involved. According to our IPN model, a set of brain regions of the ToM system (i.e. left and right temporoparietal junction, precuneus, and medial prefrontal cortex) are differentially involved in comprehending different types of intention, such as private or social intentions. We provide independent and convergent evidence on the role of the IPN model in communicative intention processing and we show that the engagement of the IPN does not depend upon the com...
Introduction. The present study was intended to evaluate the effects of a rehabilitative training... more Introduction. The present study was intended to evaluate the effects of a rehabilitative training, the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment (CPT), aimed at improving communicative-pragmatic abilities and the related cognitive components, on the cerebral modifications of a single case patient diagnosed with schizophrenia. Methods. The patient underwent two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) sessions, before and after the treatment. In order to assess brain changes, we calculated the Amplitude of Low Frequency Fluctuation (ALFF) index of the resting-state fMRI signal, which is interpreted as reflecting the intensity of the spontaneous regional activity of the brain. Behavioural measures of the patient's communicative performance were also gathered before and after training and at follow-up. Results. The patient improved his communicative performance in almost all tests. Posttraining stronger ALFF signal emerged in the superior, inferior, and medial frontal gyri, as well as the ...
The present work studies the communicative impairment in subjects with closed head injury (CHI) w... more The present work studies the communicative impairment in subjects with closed head injury (CHI) within the framework of a communicative competence theory. We hypothesize that the metacognitive deficit caused by CHI trauma impairs some communicative functions such as the ability to use of an inferential metalevel, and the ability to deal with communicative information in absence of syntax. Two groups of CHI subjects, namely 13 and 30, were tested respectively on linguistic and extralinguistic tasks. The main results confirm in both communicative modalities a significant gap between the ability to deal with communicative acts that require the inferential metalevel (not standard acts, such as deception and irony) and that do not require it (standard acts, such as directs and indirects). Moreover, the main difference between linguistic and extralinguistic communication resides in the presence of a syntactic guide: extralinguistic communicative comprehension rests wholly on the subject's logical, inferential and integrative capacities. In patients who lack them, such as CHI patients, it implies a significant loss of extralinguistic communicative ability. Riassunto. Il lavoro indaga la competenza comunicativa in due gruppi di soggetti con trauma cranio-encefalico (TCE) chiuso. L'obiettivo è di testare alcune predizioni tratte da una teoria della pragmatica. La nostra ipotesi è che questo tipo di trauma causi un deficit delle capacità metacognitive che si riflette in modo specifico sulle funzioni comunicative, in particolare sull'uso di un metalivello inferenziale e sull'abilità ad integrare informazioni comunicative in assenza di sintassi. Abbiamo testato su compiti di comunicazione linguistica ed extralinguistica due gruppi di pazienti con TCE chiuso composti da 13 e 30 pazienti. I risultati principali confermano per entrambe le modalità comunicative l'esistenza di uno iato significativo tra gli atti che richiedono l'intervento di un metalivello inferenziale (atti non standard, come inganno e ironia) e quelli che non lo richiedono (atti standard, come diretti e indiretti). Inoltre, evidenziano come la differenza principale tra comunicazione linguistica ed extralinguistica risieda nella presenza o assenza di una guida sintattica; ciò comporta che nella comunicazione extralinguistica la comprensione gravi interamente sulle capacità logiche, inferenziali ed integrative del soggetto. In pazienti come i nostri, ciò corrisponde a un significativo calo della capacità di comprensione.
A targeted training program for the rehabilitation of communicative abilities-Cognitive Pragmatic... more A targeted training program for the rehabilitation of communicative abilities-Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment (CPT)-has been developed and previously tested on a sample of patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI), whose performance was found to have improved. Since cortical plasticity has been recognized as the main mechanism of functional recovery, we investigated whether and how behavioral improvements following the training program are accompanied by brain modifications. Eight TBI patients took part in the training program and were behaviorally assessed pre-and post-treatment; six of these patients were also evaluated with pre-and post-treatment resting state (rs) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). At the end of the rehabilitation program patients showed improvement in overall communicative performance, in both comprehension and production tasks. A follow-up retest revealed the stability of these results 3 months after completing the training program. At the brain level, we found significant increases in the amplitude of low frequency fluctuation (ALFF) index in the bilateral precentral gyrus, in the right middle and superior temporal gyri, in the right cingulate gyrus, and in the left inferior parietal lobule. We discuss these differences of brain activity in terms of their possible contribution to promoting recovery.
Cognitive Pragmatics theory is concerned with analyzing the cognitive processes underlying commun... more Cognitive Pragmatics theory is concerned with analyzing the cognitive processes underlying communication. In previous works we have explained the emergence of communication in context, as revealed by very young children, and the communicative deficits shown by closed head injury patients. The aim of the present work is an extension of Cognitive Pragmatics to the emergence and the decay of extra-linguistic communication. In particular, we investigate the performance of 2- to 7-year-old children and that of Alzheimer's patients in standard and nonstandard (irony and deceit) pragmatic tasks. The predictions derived by Cognitive Pragmatics are confirmed. Comprehension of pragmatic phenomena which are more complex according to the theory emerges later in the development (Experiment 1), and their decay is most severe in Alzheimer's patients (Experiment 2). We conclude that the framework provided by Cognitive Pragmatics can accommodate both the development and the decay of extra-li...
International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 2014
The aim of the present study is to provide an in-depth description of the communicative errors ma... more The aim of the present study is to provide an in-depth description of the communicative errors made by participants with closed-head injury (CHI). Method: A group of 30 individuals with CHI and normal matched controls took part in the experiment. They were presented with a series of short videotaped vignettes depicting everyday social exchanges and tested on comprehension and production of different kinds of communicative acts (direct and indirect speech acts, irony and deceit). The participants' answers were evaluated as correct or incorrect. Incorrect answers were then further rated as totally incorrect or with the presence of intermediate errors. Results: Individuals with CHI performed worse than controls on all the tasks investigated when considering correct vs. incorrect answers. Furthermore, a series of logistic regression analyses showed that group membership (CHI vs. controls) significantly predicted the occurrence of intermediate errors in responses on both comprehension and production tasks. Conclusion: Participants with CHI tend to have marked difficulty understanding and producing different types of communicative acts, and make more intermediate errors than control participants. The findings support a theoretical framework of communication in which the comprehension and production of communicative acts are viewed as step-by-step processes rather than as "all-or-none" phenomena.
We propose a taxonomy of the different categories of context which contribute to reconstruct the ... more We propose a taxonomy of the different categories of context which contribute to reconstruct the communicative intention of a speaker. In particular, we investigate the following categories: Access, Space, Time, Discourse, Move, and Status. We propose that different contexts pertaining to the same category make the hearer assign different communicative meanings to the same expressive act. We validate our expectations through an experiment on three groups of children aged 3-7 years. The results confirm our predictions and reveal that different context categories and within them, different contexts, play different roles in the reconstruction of the communicative intentions in children belonging to the different age groups.
The aim of the present research is to perform a detailed and empirical investigation of schizophr... more The aim of the present research is to perform a detailed and empirical investigation of schizophrenia patients' deficits in recognizing and recovering a communicative failure. In particular, this paper investigates the role of theory of mind (ToM) and of the complexity of the mental representations involved in explaining patients' deficits in recognizing and recovering different kinds of communicative failures, i.e. failure of the expressive act, failure of communicative meaning and failure of the communicative effect. Twenty-two patients with schizophrenia and an equal number of healthy controls took part in the experiment. The experimental protocol consisted of videotaped stories in which two agents interact, showing a communicative failure; the participants were asked to recognize and repair the observed failure. Some classical ToM tests (Sally and Ann, Modified Smarties and a selection of six Strange Stories) were also administered. Our results revealed a deficit in patients, when compared with healthy controls, in recognizing and recovering communicative failures. Furthermore, focusing on schizophrenia patients' performance per se, we observed a trend with regard to the increasing difficulty of understanding and recognizing different kinds of communicative failures, i.e. failure of expression act, failure of communicative meaning, and failure of the communicative effect.
The aim of this paper was to develop and test two equivalent forms of the Assessment Battery for ... more The aim of this paper was to develop and test two equivalent forms of the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), a tool for evaluating pragmatic abilities in patients with neuropsychological and psychiatric disorders. The equivalent forms were created using the data from a sample of 390 children, then tested in a sample of 30 patients with traumatic brain injury. Equivalent forms of the same test are useful in clinical practice and intervention research, when performance needs to be tested on two separate occasions, for example before and after a rehabilitation program. The present results provide additional evidence on the psychometric functioning of the equivalent forms of the ABaCo and their usability in a clinical context.
The aim of the present study was to evaluate the pragmatic abilities of patients with schizophren... more The aim of the present study was to evaluate the pragmatic abilities of patients with schizophrenia in a variety of pragmatic phenomena expressed through different communicative means (language, gestures, and paralinguistic modality). For this purpose we used the Assessment Battery of Communication (ABaCo; Sacco et al., 2008). The ABaCo is a validated clinical tool for assessing pragmatic skills, which comprises five evaluation scales-linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic, context, and conversational-investigating both comprehension and production of the main pragmatic phenomena involved in a communicative exchange, such as direct and indirect speech acts, irony, deceit, the violation of Grice's maxims, topic management, and turn-taking. The battery was administered to a group of seventeen patients with schizophrenia, and matched healthy controls. We expected the clinical group to perform widely worse than the control group in the different pragmatic dimensions investigated. Results showed that patients with schizophrenia performed significantly worse than controls on all the five scales of the battery, both in comprehension and production tasks. Moreover, the results within each scale showed a differentiated performance in the clinical group among the pragmatic phenomena, with irony assessed as the most difficult task. The implications of these results for research and treatment in schizophrenia are discussed. Learning outcomes: After reading this article, the reader will be able to: (1) summarize thepreliminary assessment of pragmatic impairments in patients with schizophrenia; (2) describea variegated communicative profile regarding different pragmatic phenomena; and (3) discuss the planning and evaluating specific rehabilitation programs.
Human communicative competence is based on the ability to process a specific class of mental stat... more Human communicative competence is based on the ability to process a specific class of mental states, namely, communicative intention. The present fMRI study aims to analyze whether intention processing in communication is affected by the expressive means through which a communicative intention is conveyed, that is, the linguistic or extralinguistic gestural means. Combined factorial and conjunction analyses were used to test two sets of predictions: first, that a common brain network is recruited for the comprehension of communicative intentions independently of the modality through which they are conveyed; second, that additional brain areas are specifically recruited depending on the communicative modality used, reflecting distinct sensorimotor gateways. Our results clearly showed that a common neural network is engaged in communicative intention processing independently of the modality used. This network includes the precuneus, the left and right posterior STS and TPJ, and the me...
ABSTRACTPrevious studies on children's pragmatic abilities have tended to focus on just one p... more ABSTRACTPrevious studies on children's pragmatic abilities have tended to focus on just one pragmatic phenomenon and one expressive means at a time, mainly concentrating on comprehension, and overlooking the production side. We assessed both comprehension and production in relation to several pragmatic phenomena (simple and complex standard communication acts, irony, and deceit) and several expressive means (linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic). Our study involved 390 Italian-speaking children divided into three age groups: 5;0–5;6, 6;6–7;0, and 8;0–8;6. Children's performance on all tasks improved with their age. Within each age group, children responded more accurately to tasks involving standard communication than to those involving deceit and irony, across all expressive means and for both comprehension and production. Within each pragmatic phenomenon, children responded more accurately to simple acts than to complex ones, regardless of age group and expressive m...
Our field of research is cognitive pragmatics, that is, the theoretical and empirical study of th... more Our field of research is cognitive pragmatics, that is, the theoretical and empirical study of the mental events involved in human communication. Communication is a form of social activity; more precisely, it is an agent's intentional and overt attempt to affect a partner's mental states (Airenti, Bara, & Colombetti, 1993a, 1993b; Tirassa, 1997). While, historically, this area used to have no specific relationship with the neurosciences, our work is aimed at a convergence that seems to us capable of yielding valuable results. Theories in pragmatics are typically analytical and developed on autonomous grounds; the neurosciences, and in particular the neuropsychology of mind/brain impairments, provide them with a natural empirical test bed. While, of course, the pathology of a cognitive function may always shed an interesting light on its physiology, in the case of communication this research strategy is made almost necessary by the intricacies of doing experimental pragmatics in the normal, healthy adult. Different neuropsychological diseases will affect communicative performance in different ways, depending on what relevant cognitive subsystems are damaged and how. Competing theories of communication make different statements as to the nature of these subsystems and of their interconnections and therefore yield different predictions as to the patterns of their decay. It thus becomes possible to compare and to possibly falsify them. The same line of reasoning, transferred to normal development, also suggests to study the acquisition of communicative abilities in the child. Neuroscience and pragmatics have quite distinct roles in this enterprise, the former being somewhat ancillary to the latter: given a powerful theory This research is currently supported by the
Although there are many theories about autism, something all of them agree upon is that autistics... more Although there are many theories about autism, something all of them agree upon is that autistics are impaired in the ability to communicate. The explanation is either their incapacity to attribute mental states to others or the interference of irrelevant stimuli with the access and processing of the communication (low). Our study on mute autistic children aims to investigate their communicative ability in order to bring some new evidence on the debate. We used an experimental technique that allows autistic children to access and process the communicative acts in a familiar context for as long as needed. The experimental results show that our sample of autistic children performs as well as the control group of normal children in dealing with directs, indirects, ironies, deceits, and recoveries of failure. Independent of their respective difficulty, the felicitous outcome of any of these acts requires the capacity to attribute an adequate communicative intention to the actor. Moreover, our results show that, contrary to the established findings in the literature, autistics' performance in the standard false belief task, a task that requires one to understand the mental states of other people, is equivalent to the performance of normal subjects. We argue that an attentional deficit affects the communicative performance of autistics in experiments where classic methodologies are used; with the proper methodology, we can access the unexplored world where mute autistic children also communicate. As far as we know, this is the first systematic experiment on pragmatic abilities in mute autistic children. Indeed, our work shows that tests and methodologies which help to focus on the communicative task improve the autistics' performance with respect to those used in the literature. We conclude that the autistic communicative deficit is at the performance level and that it has an attentional nature.
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