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, even those who do not suffer from aphasia. Yet, there still exist inconsistencies among results of different studies, in particular in microlinguistic level. Moreover, limited languages are studied in this regard. So 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 Persian-speaking individuals with TBI to determine impaired linguistic measures in 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 on some microlinguistic and all macrolinguistic measures compared to their control peers. Conclusions: The results of this study suggest that multi-level narrative discourse analysis of Persian-speaking individuals with TBI may be useful for speech/language pathologists wishing to evaluate communication disorders in persons with TBI.