Spoken persuasive discourse abilities of adolescents with acquired brain injury.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine the performance of adolescents with acquired brain injury (ABI) during a spoken persuasive discourse task. Persuasive discourse is frequently used in social and academic settings and is of importance in the study of adolescent language.

Method: Participants included 8 adolescents with ABI and 8 peers without ABI who were matched for age, gender, and education. A spoken persuasive discourse task requiring participants to express their opinion on a topic was administered, and the 2 groups were compared on measures of language productivity, syntactic complexity, and language content. In addition, the relationship between working memory and discourse production was explored.

Results: There were no statistically significant group differences on measures of language productivity or syntactic complexity, with the exception of the use of mazes, which was more prevalent in the discourse of the group with ABI. However, there were significant differences in language content, with age-matched peers producing more than twice as many supporting reasons and far fewer tangentially related utterances than the adolescents with ABI.

Conclusions: Persuasive discourse production was affected following ABI. Given the importance of persuasive discourse in social and academic situations, further investigations into factors that influence discourse production in adolescents with ABI are warranted.