Assessment Battery for Communication: Development of two equivalent forms

Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment

“…55,56 Equivalent forms of the same test are useful tools in clinical practice and intervention research, when patients' performance needs to be tested at different times, before and after a rehabilitation program. They use test and retest procedures to provide a measure of treatment efficacy and reduce the possibility of patients' scores obtained during the retest assessment session being attributable to practice and memory, rather than representing an actual measurement of their progress.…”

“…Each videotaped scene lasts 20 to 25 seconds and comprises a controlled number of words (range: 7 ± 2). 5,[54][55][56][57] Moreover, before (T1) and after the training program (T2), a series of neuropsychological and ToM tests (see Table 2 for a brief description of the aim and the procedure of each test) were administered to the patients to assess and establish the integrity or impairment of ToM and the main cognitive functions (ie, attention, memory, planning ability, cognitive flexibility, logical reasoning) and to evaluate the effect of possible cognitive deficits in undermining patients' communication skills.…”

“…Furthermore, another novelty of this study is that, to our knowledge, this is the first time that equivalent forms 55 of the same test, the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), 56,57 have been used to evaluate improvements in patients' communicative performance. 58 To summarize, we expected patients to show an improvement in their communicative-pragmatic skills after CPT, with regard to all the communication modalities taught during the rehabilitation sessions.…”

“…For all tasks, the patients obtained 0 point if they were not able to produce the requested communication act in the requested modality. 5,[54][55][56][57]72 The psychometric …”

Comprehension and Hemispheric Processing of Irony in Schizophrenia

“…The current study will also assess irony comprehension using two different tasks that vary in their demands. Utilizing the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo) (Bosco et al, 2012a), broad pragmatic abilities (e.g., direct and indirect speech acts, irony, deceit, violations of Grice’s maxims, topic management, and turn-taking) were examined on five scales (i.e., linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic, context, and conversational) in patients with schizophrenia (Colle et al, 2013). The results show that SZ patient’s impairment extends to all the domains of pragmatic ability as compared to healthy controls, with irony being the most difficult task.…”