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Primary objective: This study investigated the relationship between working memory and comprehension of low-familiarity proverbs in adolescents with traumatic brain injury (TBI).Methods and procedures: Ten adolescents, aged 12–21 years who had suffered a TBI prior to the age of 10 years and 10 individually age-matched peers with typical development participated in the study. The participants listened to short paragraphs containing a proverb and interpreted the meaning of the proverb using a forced-choice task. In addition, participants engaged in a task that evaluated working memory ability. Main outcomes and results: Analysis revealed that individuals with TBI differed from their non-injured peers in their understanding of proverbs. In addition, working memory capacity influenced performance for all participants.Conclusions: The importance of considering working memory when evaluating figurative language comprehension in adolescents with TBI is highlighted. Implications for future research, particularly ...

This study investigated inference comprehension performance in adolescents who had suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Using stimuli adapted from Lehman-Blake and Tompkins, participants listened to short paragraphs that varied according to the working memory demands of the task and answered comprehension questions that required inferences to be generated. Six adolescents, aged 12-16 years, who had suffered a TBI prior to the age of 10 years, were assessed and their performance was compared to six individually age-matched peers with typical development. Analysis revealed that individuals with TBI did not differ from non-injured peers in their understanding of inferences when the storage demands of the task were minimized. However, when storage demands were high, adolescents with TBI performed poorly compared to their age-matched peers. Results are discussed relative to a working-memory hypothesis of impairment following TBI.

The performance of adolescents who suffered a traumatic brain injury in childhood, on language comprehension tasks with varying working memory demands, was examined. It was hypothesized that adolescents with a traumatic brain injury would perform more poorly than their non-injured peers, particularly on those tasks with high working memory demands. A case study design allowed for both group and intra-participant comparisons. A battery of language comprehension and working memory tasks was administered to six adolescents aged 12-16 years. Their performance was compared with six individually age-matched peers with typical development and to the normative data of the standardized tests. Intra-participant performance was examined by comparing results across language tasks that varied in working memory demands. Analysis revealed that individuals with traumatic brain injury performed poorly compared with their age-matched peers. However, the pattern of listening comprehension impairment differed across individuals and marked variability within the comprehension profiles for some individuals with traumatic brain injury was evident. Language comprehension tasks with high working memory demands generally posed the most difficulty for individuals with traumatic brain injury.