Pragmatic Language Comprehension After Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury: A Scoping Review

This scoping review aims to examine the literature pertaining to pragmatic language comprehension in pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI), in order to summarize the current evidence and to identify areas for further research.

We searched MEDLINE Ovid and PsycINFO Ovid using search terms to identify all articles that examined pragmatic language comprehension in children and adolescents with TBI published until November 2017.

A total of 13 articles met our inclusion criteria. The studies included examined a number of pragmatic domains including knowledge-based and pragmatic inferences, detection and judgment of ambiguous sentences, comprehension of humor, understanding of figurative language (eg, metaphors and idioms), and comprehension of irony and deceptive praise.

The research suggests that children and adolescents with TBI, as compared with healthy or orthopedically injured controls, display deficits in comprehension of pragmatic language. Children with severe TBI demonstrate more widespread deficits in pragmatic comprehension abilities, whereas children with mild TBI show relatively intact pragmatic comprehension. Limitations and gaps identified in the literature warrant further research in this area.