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Let it Linger? Using a Multi-Method Approach to Investigate the Lingering Impact of Concussion on Comprehension
Poster Session D, Saturday, October 26, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm, Great Hall 3 and 4
Tara Flaugher1, Rocio Norman2, Nicole Wicha1; 1University of Texas at San Antonio, 2University of Texas Health San Antonio
Millions suffer mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) annually. In some individuals, symptoms like slow processing speed and poor sleep may linger beyond the normal recovery period and influence cognitive processes like language comprehension. However, the relationship between chronic mTBI symptoms and language comprehension is relatively unexplored. This presentation will summarize the findings from three dissertation studies investigating the impact of mTBI and related symptoms on language comprehension. This research investigated the effects of mTBI-related symptoms on word-pair and sentence comprehension in both injured and uninjured populations. Since language problems after mTBI historically have been challenging to study, a multi-methodology approach was used to increase the likelihood of detecting the subtle effect of mTBI and related symptoms on language comprehension, and included event-related potentials (ERP), self-reported symptom questionnaires and behavioral measures. First, participants with chronic mTBI history with either low or high neurobehavioral symptoms performed a listening comprehension task with instructions that did or did not provide clear time constraints. This showed that those individuals with higher neurobehavioral symptoms demonstrated slower sentence processing times when instructions provided no time constraints. Next, a self-paced reading ERP comprehension study revealed equivalent P600s, an ERP index for grammatical errors, for injured and non-injured groups. In the mTBI group, the P600 effect was less focally distributed and correlated with sleep quality. Finally, a word-pair predictability paradigm was used to examine the relationship between lexical association and mTBI-related symptoms. Non-injured individuals were asked to predict a noun after reading an adjective. Word pairs were highly predictable, lowly predictable, or incongruent. Robust N400 effects, an ERP index for meaning comprehension, were observed but were not modulated by symptom severity. In sum, contrary to limited prior research, brain and behavior measures of language comprehension after mTBI show subtle differences compared to normative controls, and sets the baseline for future work. This research demonstrates the value of a multi-method approach and the importance of considering symptoms when investigating language comprehension after chronic mTBI.
Topic Areas: Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics, Meaning: Lexical Semantics