[Emotions and situations of communication in children and adolescents with frontal cerebral lesions]. / L'analyse des émotions et des situations de communication chez des enfants et des adolescents lésés frontaux.

OBJECTIVE: Following cerebral lesions, especially right and frontal cerebral lesions, patients often have difficulties in social cognition. Emotional skills are often impaired. Adults with cerebral lesions have difficulty identifying facial emotional expressions and attributing emotions in situations of communication. However, few studies have involved children and adolescents with cerebral lesions. Our first goal was to determine whether the performance in emotional tasks of young patients with frontal cerebral lesions is as impaired as that of adults, and the second goal was to study the role of emotional cues in pragmatic aspects of language. METHOD: The study involved 7 children and adolescents with frontal cerebral lesions but no aphasia and 7 control subjects. We used two emotional tasks: one to assess the ability to identify facial emotional expressions, and one to assess the ability to attribute emotions in situations of communication. RESULTS: The control and experimental groups did not differ significantly in identifying and attributing emotions. A further analysis of responses revealed that the patients were more impaired than controls in attributing complex emotions. As well, the patients tended to produce more justifications based on irrelevant elements than the controls. CONCLUSION: Our first data have shown that the children and adolescents with frontal cerebral lesions retain the ability to analyse emotions in situations of communication but have subtle difficulty in analysing emotional cues in social situations.

Communication deficits: assessment of subjects with frontal lobe damage in an interview setting.

This paper is about communication deficits in an interview setting among adolescents with frontal lobe damage. One of the predominant characteristics of these patients is difficulty taking the context into account. Pragmatic theories, which attempt to clarify the link between the formal structure of language and the extra-linguistic context (such as the interlocutor's characteristics or strategies), may help provide insight into the difficulties of these patients. An interview setting, viewed here as a communication situation, is governed by an interaction format based on specific cooperative principles. In this study, the results of subjects with frontal lobe damage (in the role of interviewee) were first compared with those of normal subjects in an interview situation. Three pragmatic indexes were considered: the number of utterances per speaking turn (speech quantity), amount of digression (keeping to the topic or predefined subject of conversation shared by the interlocutors) and prevalence of within-subject contingency speaking turns without an intervening remark by the interviewer (topic development). Secondly, we attempted to determine whether the patients' discourse was dependent upon the interviewer's conversational strategy (structured, non-structured, or alternating). The results clearly point out the extent of the difficulty frontal lobe patients have conforming to the rules of the interview situation, whether regarding the amount of speech they produce or their ability to keep within and/or development of the topic of conversation. The data also indicated that the patients' linguistic productions varied with the interviewer's strategy. The structured strategy did not always give rise to the best performance: while the unstructured and alternating strategies allowed patients to produce more utterances per speaking turn, the alternating strategy enabled better development of the interview topic. These results suggest that such variations could be put to fruitful use in remedial techniques.