Impaired discourse gist and working memory in children after brain injury.
Emerging evidence suggests that a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in childhood may disrupt the ability to abstract the central meaning or gist-based memory from connected language (discourse). The current study adopts a novel approach to elucidate the role of immediate and working memory processes in producing a cohesive and coherent gist-based text in the form of a summary in children with mild and severe TBI as compared to typically developing children, ages 8-14 years at test. Both TBI groups showed decreased performance on a summary production task as well as retrieval of specific content from a long narrative. Working memory on n-back tasks was also impaired in children with severe TBI, whereas immediate memory performance for recall of a simple word list in both TBI groups was comparable to controls. Interestingly, working memory, but not simple immediate memory for a word list, was significantly correlated with summarization ability and ability to recall discourse content.
Chapman
Sandra B
SB
Center for BrainHealth, Institute of Biomedical Sciences and Technology, The University of Texas at Dallas, USA. schapman@utdallas.edu
Gamino
Jacquelyn F
JF
Cook
Lori G
LG
Hanten
Gerri
G
Li
Xiaoqi
X
Levin
Harvey S
HS
D000293:Adolescent; D001930:Brain Injuries / Q000150:complications* / Q000503:physiopathology; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D016009:Chi-Square Distribution; D002648:Child; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000209:etiology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016014:Linear Models; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D013064:Speech Disorders / Q000209:etiology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014705:Verbal Behavior