ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two analyses: exchange structure analysis and generic structure potential analysis. Traditionally, communication impairment following traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been viewed as a range of deficits that are identified from assessments administered in clinical settings. Ehrlich, J. S. and Barry, P found that the selected communication behaviours e.g. intelligibility, eye gaze, sentence formation, coherence, topic management, and initiation could be reliably rated and provided descriptive information concerning the communicative functioning of TBI adults. As conditions were varied according to social distance and power imbalance, it was hypothesised that the person with TBI would be less able to adapt to this variation. Therapists gave more information to controls than to TBI subjects. The person with TBI will have some strengths, or in M. A. K. Halliday's terms, some intact language resources that can be inhibited by the language choices of their partner.
