Narrative and procedural discourse after closed head injury

Aspects of productivity, content, and cohesion in the narrative and procedural discourse of 11 closed head-injured (CHI) adults and 21 normal adults were examined. Two narrative tasks, one involving retelling a story heard and the other formulating a story based on a comic strip, and one procedural task of telling how to buy groceries were administered to each subject. CHI subjects consistently produced fewer words, spoke slower, used more mazes (dysfluencies), produced fewer target content units, and used fewer cohesive ties per utterance, as compared to the normal subjects. Other significant differences in discourse occurred between the two groups, but these varied from task to task. Normal subjects varied characteristics of their discourse performance according to the discourse task. Significant differences across tasks occurred on seven of the 13 discourse measures. The CHI subjects, however, showed more limited variation in that their performance varied on only three of the 13 measures. Correlations among discourse, language, and memory measures were examined and discussed. The results of this study indicate that analysis of CHI narrative and procedural discourse has important clinical and theoretical implications.