Exchanges of information in the talk of people with traumatic brain injury

Traditionally, studies have aimed to describe verbal deficits following TBI focusing on assessment at semantic, syntactic, and phonological levels. Results have indicated that there is recovery at these linguistic levels (Sarno, 1980; Sarno & Levita, 1986). That is, it would appear that the majority of people with TBI have intact linguistic processing at the clause level. However, assessment above the level of the clause shows communication breaks down. In particular, it is clear that people with TBI do not manage in conversations (Groher, 1977; Halpern, Darley, & Brown, 1973; Levin, Grossman, Rose, & Teasdale, 1979). Nonetheless, conversation has not been examined extensively as a genre in TBI in its own right.