Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation

This scoping review aims to examine the literature pertaining to pragmatic language comprehension in pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI), in order to summarize the current evidence and to identify areas for further research. We searched MEDLINE Ovid and PsycINFO Ovid using search terms to identify all articles that examined pragmatic language comprehension in children and adolescents with TBI published until November 2017. A total of 13 articles met our inclusion criteria. The studies included examined a number of pragmatic domains including knowledge-based and pragmatic inferences, detection and judgment of ambiguous sentences, comprehension of humor, understanding of figurative language (eg, metaphors and idioms), and comprehension of irony and deceptive praise. The research suggests that children and adolescents with TBI, as compared with healthy or orthopedically injured controls, display deficits in comprehension of pragmatic language. Children with severe TBI demonstrate more widespread deficits in pragmatic comprehension abilities, whereas children with mild TBI show relatively intact pragmatic comprehension. Limitations and gaps identified in the literature warrant further research in this area.

Organisms exhibit an incredible diversity of form, a fact that makes the evolution of novelty seemingly self-evident. However, despite the "obvious" case for novelty, defining this concept in evolutionary terms is highly problematic, so much so that some have suggested discarding it altogether. Approaches to this problem tend to take either an adaptation- or development-based perspective, but we argue here that an exclusive focus on either of these misses the original intent of the novelty concept and undermines its practical utility. We propose instead that for a feature to be novel, it must have evolved both by a transition between adaptive peaks on the fitness landscape and that this transition must have overcome a previous developmental constraint. This definition focuses novelty on the explanation of apparently difficult or low-probability evolutionary transitions and highlights how the integration of developmental and functional considerations are necessary to evolutionary explanation. It further reinforces that novelty is a central concern not just of evolutionary developmental biology (i.e., "evo-devo") but of evolutionary biology more generally. We explore this definition of novelty in light of four examples that range from the obvious to subtle.