Supplemental Digital Content 1
Structure of the rehabilitation sessions in the Cognitive-Pragmatic Treatment
Awareness (Sessions 1 & 24): The first and last sessions of the rehabilitation program are
concerned with awareness of the deficit and progress made by patients. In particular, the first
session concentrates on the construction of the clinical setting and the introduction of the program,
its aims and the tools used; the patients are asked to introduce themselves and explain the
communication difficulties they experience in their daily living. These interventions are videorecorded and then used in the last session to verify the progress made and compare the initial
performance of each patient with the abilities acquired through the training program.
General Communication Ability (Sessions 2, 3, 22 & 23): In these sessions, two in the early stages
of the program and two at the end, the patients practice their communication abilities and test their
overall pragmatic effectiveness using all the modalities that constitute communicative competence.
Material: Video-taped scenes and role playing.
Linguistic Ability (Sessions 4 & 5): These sessions are concerned with rehabilitation and improving
patients’ linguistic abilities. Material: Video-taped scenes and role playing.
Extralinguistic Ability (Sessions 6 & 7): These sessions are concerned with rehabilitation and
improving patients’ gestural abilities. Material: Video-taped scenes and role playing, based on the
extralinguistic modality.
Paralinguistic Ability (Sessions 8, 9 & 10): These sessions are concerned with rehabilitation and
strengthening the communicative aspects that determine the emotional connotation of a
communication act. Material: Video-taped scenes, Facial Expression Recognition tasks: Picture of
Facial Affect (POFA)1, JACfee & JACneuf 2, JACbart3, Eyes Task-Adult 4, Cohn-kanade Database
(FACS model)5, role playing, grammelot.
Social Appropriateness Ability (Sessions 11 & 12): These sessions are concerned with
rehabilitation and improving abilities related to social appropriateness and communicative adequacy
in relation to different contexts. Material: Video-taped scenes and role playing.
Conversational Ability (Sessions 13 & 14): These sessions are concerned with rehabilitation and
enhancing the use of conversational rules, in terms of turn-taking and maintaining the topic of
conversation. Material: Video-taped scenes, role playing and Tangram
Management of Telephone Conversations (Sessions 15 & 16): These sessions are concerned with
rehabilitation and enhancing the use of conversational rules specifically in respect of telephone
conversations, in which you cannot take advantage of the paralinguistic and gestural elements
which usually accompany and connote communicative interactions. Material: Audio-taped
telephone conversations and role playing.
Planning Ability (Sessions 17 & 18): These sessions are concerned with rehabilitation and
enhancing planning abilities, which play an important role in structuring targeted and effective
communicative behaviors. Material: sub-goal task activities, both alone and in groups, such as
planning of daily errands and household chores, or the preparation of a meal.
Theory of Mind (Sessions 19 & 20): Rehabilitation sessions concerned with enhancing the ability
to formulate meta-representations with respect to one’s own and others' mental states.
Material: Video-taped scenes and role playing.
Narrative Ability (Session 21): Rehabilitation sessions concerned with enhancing the ability to tell
a story or describe a situation, giving the right amount of information in the appropriate way.
Material: Discourse Comprehension Test 6
Speech elicitation pictures (WAB)7, Description tasks on Norman Rockwell Pictures.
References
1. Ekman P, Friesen WV. Pictures of facial affect. Palo Alto, CA: Consuling Psychology Press;
1976.
2. Matsumoto D, Ekman P. Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion (JACFEE)
and Neutral Faces (JACNeuF). San Francisco, CA: San Francisco State University, Department
of Psychology; 1988.
3. Matsumoto D, LeRoux J, Wilson-Cohn C. A new test to measure emotion recognition ability:
Matsumoto and Ekman’s Japanese and Caucasian Brief Affect Recognition test (JACBART). J
Nonverbal Behav, 2000; 24.
4. Baron-Cohen S, Jolliffe T, Mortimore C, Robertson M. Another advanced test of theory of
mind: Evidence from very high functioning adults with autism or Asperger Syndrome. J
Child Psychology Psychiatry, 1997; 813-822.
5. Kanade T, Cohn J, Tian YL. Comprehensive database for facial expression analysis.
Proceedings of International Conference on face and Gesture recognition, 2000; 46-53.
6. Brookshire RH, Nicholas LE. Discourse Comprehension Test: Test Manual. Minneapolis, MN:
BRK Publishers; 1993.
7. Kertesz, A. Western Aphasia Battery. New York: Grune & Stratton; 1982.