Background: Following a traumatic brain injury or right hemisphere damage, many patients have difficulty understanding non-literal language. However, tools for assessing this disorder are sorely lacking in French. The existing tests (in particular the IRonie and Indirect Request comprehension test - IRRI) also have certain limitations, including the time-consuming administration.
Objectives: The present study aims to present (1) the construction, (2) the content validity, and (3) the preliminary normative data of the short version of the Irony and Indirect Requests comprehension test (IRRI-C).
Methods: (1) To select the twelve items of each IRRI-C task, difficulty and discrimination indices, item-total score correlations, and differences in correct responses between patients and control participants were calculated from the responses of 33 brain-damaged participants and 102 control subjects to the long version (36 items) of the IRRI test. (2) The tool was then given to seven speech and language therapists and neuropsychologists, who used a questionnaire to assess the clarity and relevance of the IRRI-C in assessing the target construct. (3) Finally, the IRRI-C was administered to 121 control subjects aged between 20 and 65 years to provide preliminary normative data.
Results: (1) The twelve stimuli with the best difficulty and discrimination indices, item-total score correlations, and the greatest differences between patients and control participants were selected for each task. A PowerPoint presentation, a scoring sheet, and an introduction and scoring booklet were produced and made available to clinicians on the Internet. (2) Questionnaires on construct validity showed that the IRRI-C was highly relevant for assessing the target construct and that the introductory booklet, instructions, and scoring guide were very clear. (3) Norms stratified according to the variables of interest manipulated in the tasks (context, executive demand, and presence of markers) were calculated as percentiles.
Conclusion: The IRRI-C fills an important gap in French-language pragmatics assessment tools. Its shorter format and stratification of norms make it a tool better adapted to clinical reality and conducive to the development of diagnostic hypotheses and therapeutic goals. Future improvements, including validation in different populations and a finer-grained analysis of production during scoring, will further enhance its clinical relevance.
