The effect of executive functioning on the narrative performance of African-American adolescents and emerging adults with mild closed head injury

This study examined the effects of executive functioning, age, culture, and elicitation method on the narratives of African American adolescents and emerging adults with closed head injury (CHI). The participants in the study comprised two groups, 10 with closed head injury (CHI) and 20 non-brain-injured (NBI) who served as the control group (CON). The CHI participants were recruited from Howard University Hospital (HUH). All participants were African Americans ranging in age from 14.0--25.0 years.;Narratives were elicited in three story tasks, personal event narrative (Task A), story generation with an action picture (Task B), and story generation with a comic strip (Task C) and analyzed using three measures at the levels of sentence production, intersential cohesion, and story grammar. Results indicated there are highly significant differences present in the intersential cohesive adequacy and the story grammar measure based upon the elicitation task.;The CON group produced more words per t-unit (sentence production) than the CHI group on the story generation task with a comic strip (Task C). On both story generation tasks the CON group produced more complete ties (intersential cohesion) than the CHI group on the story generation tasks. The CHI group produced more incomplete ties (intersential cohesion) on the personal event narrative (Task A), while the CON group produced more incomplete ties on the story generation task with a comic strip (Task C). In addition, the CON group produced more incomplete episodes (story grammar) than the CHI group on the story generation tasks.;Based upon these results, the personal event narrative did not reveal many significant differences, while the story generation tasks did reveal significant differences in the measures of cohesion and story grammar. These findings provide critical information that will be useful in designing assessment and treatment paradigms that utilize narratives as the measures of cognitive and linguistic functions.