Discourse ability in children with brain injury: Correlations with psychosocial, linguistic, and cognitive factors

Abstract

Discourse deficits have recently been documented in children with closed head injury (CHI). The relationships among discourse and other variables such as psychosocial and cognitive abilities are not well understood. This investigation represents an exploratory study to elucidate potential relationships across linguistic, cognitive, and psychosocial variables in children after CHI, ranging from mild to severe, at 3 and 12 months postinjury. The most clinically salient finding was a significant relationship between narrative discourse measures and perceived communicative competence on a well-validated psychosocial measure at 1 year after injury. Additional results suggest that receptive vocabulary and certain cognitive functions (ie, planning and semantic organization), as well as injury severity, may also be related to discourse abilities. Although the findings should be interpreted with caution, the relationships across these variables warrant further validation in pediatric populations with CHI because of the functional relevance of discourse abilities to social and academic settings.