The effect of elicitation task on discourse coherence and cohesion in adolescents with brain injury

Six adolescents with traumatic brain injury and six adolescents who had been hospitalized for an illness or injury not affecting the brain were administered two narrative tasks designed to vary in their demand for spontaneous organization of information and minimize the requirement for new learning. The discourse topics--a description of each subject's injury and hospitalization, and a re-telling of a current event--were chosen to be representative of discourse in adolescent daily living. Narratives produced by subjects in each group were compared between the two tasks on measures of coherence and cohesion. Subjects in both groups produced significantly more coherent and cohesive narratives in the personal event task than in the current event task, and there was no significant difference between groups. The results are discussed in relation to face validity of language tasks for adolescents, and the multiple factors contributing to adolescent social discourse.