Narrative discourse impairments in Persian-speaking persons with traumatic brain injury: a pilot study.

OBJECTIVE: Studies have shown the presence of narrative discourse difficulties in persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI), even in those who do not suffer from aphasia. Yet, there still exist inconsistencies between the results of different studies, in particular at the microlinguistic level. Moreover, a limited number of languages have been studied in this regard. Therefore, this study aimed at examining these skills in Persian-speaking individuals with TBI. The purpose of this pilot study was to analyse the microlinguistic and macrolinguistic skills of these individuals to determine impaired linguistic measures at different levels of narrative discourse.

PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS: Fourteen non-aphasic Persian-speaking persons with TBI (9 with severe TBI and 5 with moderate TBI), aged 19-40 years (mean = 25.84, SD = 5.69), and 61 age-matched healthy adults completed a narrative task. Measures of language productivity, clause density, verbal error ratio, and cohesion ratio were calculated. Also, test-retest and inter-rater reliability coefficients were analysed.

RESULTS: The TBI group was impaired in some microlinguistic and all macrolinguistic measures compared to their control peers.

CONCLUSION: The results of this study suggest that multi-level narrative discourse analyses of Persian-speaking individuals with TBI may be useful for speech/language pathologists wishing to evaluate communication disorders in persons with TBI.