Word-finding in the conversational discourse of children with closed head injury

Abstract

Despite the fact that dysnomia or word-finding difficulty is consistently documented as a characteristic feature of the language sequelae of childhood closed head injury (CHI), few studies have examined the effects of such wordfinding problems on language performance outside the constraints of a standard confrontation naming test. The present study examined evidence for word-finding difficulties in both confrontation naming and conversation in a group of 11 children (aged 9–17) who had experienced a severe CHI. Performance of the children with CHI was compared to that of a control group individually matched for age, gender and handedness. The children with CHI demonstrated inferior performance on the test of confrontation naming. In addition, the children with CHI were found to have a conversational error profile that was different from the control group. These findings are discussed with respect to the relationship between standard test performance and communicative competence in the conversational discourse setting.