Narrative Discourse Performance in Traumatic Brain Injury: Does Story Comprehension Predict Story Retelling?

Purpose: Little is known about the relationship between discourse comprehension and production in traumatic brain injury (TBI), especially for spoken language. This study examined to what extent narrative discourse comprehension accounts for narrative discourse production outcomes (story grammar, story completeness). A secondary aim was to provisionally test an assumption of a discourse model, the structure building framework (SBF), that discourse comprehension and production share cognitive processes by investigating the strength of the relationship between them.

Method: Twenty-one individuals with TBI completed story comprehension and story retelling tasks. Discourse measures included the Discourse Comprehension Test, a picture story comprehension task, story grammar, and story completeness. Correlational and multiple regression analyses were performed using comprehension measures as predictors for production measures.

Results: There were significant moderate-to-large correlations between all comprehension and production measures. Comprehension measures approached but did not reach significance for predicting story grammar performance but strongly predicted story completeness outcomes.

Conclusions: The story comprehension measures likely tapped content aspects of discourse more so than organization. Results provided support for a link between content-focused discourse comprehension measures and discourse production outcomes, which may have clinical implications for approaches to discourse intervention. Findings were interpreted as providing preliminary support for the SBF's claim that discourse production deploys the same processes involved in discourse comprehension.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.26338045.