Narrative language in traumatic brain injury

Narrative Discourse Impairments in Persian-Speaking Persons with Traumatic Brain Injury: A Pilot Study

“…The ratings of the speech samples produced by the group of individuals with TBI were significantly lower than those obtained by the healthy participants. Also, this finding is consistent with previous studies showing the presence of massive difficulties in the global organization of information within a narrative discourse in these individuals [13,41,43,46]. Conversely, in the study by Wilson and Proctor [17], global coherence was similar for the two groups of healthy controls and individuals with TBI.…”

“…It is coherent with some findings [10,12,14,38] but not with others [13,17]. For example, Marini et al [13] considered different aspects of productivity (words, speech rate, and mean length of utterance), showing that a group of non-aphasic participants with severe TBI produced narratives with a normal number of words and an adequate mean length of utterance but suggesting that these individuals might experience problems with the speech rate. Interestingly, in that study, the reduced speech rate was found to be associated with the production of errors of cohesion.…”

“…This may suggest that they had difficulties in conceptually and linguistically linking the ideas embedded in their utterances. Consistent with our study, individuals with TBI have been shown to produce significantly more cohesion errors than a control group [13], as well as fewer cohesive ties in their narrative tasks [45]. …”

“…Importantly, the levels of language are deeply interconnected [9]. Recently, growing attention has been devoted to the development of reliable procedures for the analysis of discourse skills in persons with communicative disorders such as those with TBI [10,11,12,13,14,15]. For example, Ehrlich [16] found that a group of adults with head injury were similar to a group of healthy control participants in terms of the amount of relevant content, narrative length, and rate of speech; however, they produced narratives with significantly slower rates of information.…”

“…An interesting approach to solving the problem of narrative processing after TBI might rely on the possibility of performing narrative analysis that takes into account aspects of discourse at different levels [9]. For example, Marini et al [13] compared the narrative discourse of 14 non-aphasic speakers with severe TBI and 14 neurologically intact individuals. While the lexical and grammatical skills of the non-aphasic group with TBI were normal, they produced narratives with increased cohesion and coherence errors.…”