The persistence of communication impairments in individuals who sustained a traumatic brain injury requires the use of sensitive tools to evaluate the linguistic-cognitive problems they present, aiming at their reintegration in society. This single case study investigates the contributions of Conversation Analysis to the evaluation of the pragmatic abilities of a 27 year-old man who sustained a severe traumatic brain injury. It analyses a spontaneous conversational interaction through the study of the collaborative mechanism of turn-taking, topic management and repairs, comparing the results of this analysis with formal language tests. It discusses the contributions of this approach to develop intervention. While formal tests did not indicate the presence of language difficulties, the Conversation Analysis allowed, through the analysis of the sequence of turns and of the mutual reactions of both the interlocutors, the identification of communicative problems and the observation of how the speakers dealt with them. The results of this study revealed that Conversation Analysis is a sensitive approach to capture the linguistic-cognitive deficits caused by traumatic brain injury, providing concrete elements to be used in therapy in order to emphasize, in an organized way, the kind of discourse most used in daily life.
Brain injury; Communication disorders; Language tests; Rehabilitation; Speech-language pathology; Case reports
