Narrative language in traumatic brain injury

Abstract Persons who have sustained a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) often show impaired linguistic and/or narrative abilities. However, only few data about the narrative skills of persons with TBI are currently available. This is partly due to a lack of reliable tools to assess narrative discourse. The present study aimed to document the features of narrative discourse impairment in a group of adults with TBI. 14 severe TBI non-aphasic speakers (GCS<8) in the phase of chronical stability and 14 neurologically intact participants were recruited for the experiment. Their neuropsychological, linguistic and narrative skills were thoroughly assessed. Even if not aphasic, the individuals with TBI produced narratives with reduced levels of local and global coherence. Furthermore, their picture descriptions were also characterized by reduced percentages of lexical informativeness. Most interestingly, these disturbances were not correlated to their performance on tests assessing executive function skills and their span of verbal working memory. Overall, these results suggest the presence of a selective difficulty in TBI speakers in processing the macrolinguistic aspects of a discourse.