Characterizing Discourse Deficits Following Penetrating Head Injury: A Preliminary Model

Abstract

In spite of differing mechanisms of injury, the PHI group's discourse performance was consistent with what has been reported for individuals with CHI. The model tested represents a preliminary step toward understanding discourse production following traumatic brain injury.

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

“…This finding is partially consistent with the literature. 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.…”

“…It is then likely that what they had heard provided them with significant cues for producing more complex utterances [42]. In some other studies, the sentence complexity-related discourse of individuals with brain injury did not differ from that of a group of healthy controls [10,18,43]. The disparity in syntactic performance between studies might be due to differences between the type of scaling complexity or task differences [42].…”

“…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 Evaluation of Reading Comprehension of Expository Text in Adults With Traumatic Brain Injury

“…Several studies evaluating other high-level cognitivecommunicative functions in the TBI population, such as listening comprehension and discourse production, provide further empirical support for predicting breakdowns at different levels of reading comprehension (e.g., Chapman et al, 1992;Coelho, 2002;Coelho et al, 2013;Moran & Gillon, 2005;Moran, Kirk, & Powell, 2012;Tompkins, Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner, 1994). Ferstl, Walther, Guthke, and Von Cramon (2005) compared the narrative listening comprehension abilities of four groups: adults with left-hemispheric brain damage (n = 18), adults with right-hemispheric brain damage (n = 12), adults with traumatic brain damage (n = 34), and uninjured controls (n = 49).…”

Does Brain Volume Loss Predict Cognitive and Narrative Discourse Performance Following Traumatic Brain Injury?

“…Cognitive processes and domains, such as working memory (WM), declarative memory, executive functions (EF), and general intelligence have been shown to correlate with or predict narrative ability at multiple levels of analysis (e.g., Cannizzaro & Coelho, 2012;Chapman et al, 2006;Coelho et al, 2013;Kurczek & Duff, 2011;Wright, Capilouto, Srinivasan, & Fergadiotis, 2011). Studies of narrative discourse ability in healthy aging populations have found that performance on global (i.e., macro-level) measures is correlated with age and performance on a number of cognitive tasks.…”