The Effect of Cognitive Load on Discourse Fluency in Women with TBI

Byom, Lindsey and Turkstra, Lyn (2013) The Effect of Cognitive Load on Discourse Fluency in Women with TBI. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]

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Abstract

Each year, approximately 125,000 individuals in the United States sustain a traumatic brain injury (TBI) from which they are expected to have life-long disability (Selassie et al., 2008). Social communication deficits are common (Coelho, 1995) in individuals with TBI, and contribute to negative social outcomes (Galski, Tompkins, & Johnston, 1998; Struchen et al., 2008). Though social communication deficits after TBI are well characterized (Coelho, 1995), the underlying neurpsychological mechanisms of these deficits remain unclear. One neuropsychological deficit that has been linked to social communication impairments in the TBI literature is executive dysfunction (Channon & Watts, 2003; Coelho, Liles, & Duffy, 1995; Douglas, 2010), yet it is unclear whether this relationship is correlational (e.g., brain injury affects both social communication and executive functioning) or causal (e.g. executive dysfunction causes poor social communication). To address this knowledge gap, the aim of this study was to characterize the relationship of executive dysfunction to social communication by manipulating the executive function (EF) demands of a discourse task and investigating the effects of this manipulation on discourse performance. Participants were women with and without TBI. Women were chosen for this investigation because they are frequently under-represented in TBI research, in part to their lower risk for TBI (Faul, Xu, Wald, & Coronado) and also because there is evidence of sex-based differences in social communication outcomes following TBI (Dahlberg et al., 2006; Turkstra). The study focused on one aspect of discourse performance that might be affected by EF demand, discourse fluency.

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