Cognitive-Communication Abilities in Children With Closed Head Injury

Abstract
The cognitive-communicative needs of children and adolescents with closed head injury (CHI) are an important responsibility facing speech-language pathologists today. Growing evidence suggests that the communicative disability of this population is not being adequately addressed. This article discusses ways that we can improve the situation through (a) recognition that traditional approaches based on children with developmental language impairments (LI) will be insufficient to identify the deficits in children with CHI and (b) through use of discourse measures in assessment and treatment. Narrative discourse measures, in particular, have been shown to be more sensitive outcome measures of the cognitive-communicative problems resulting from severe CHI than are structured language tests. In addition, we present a method for analyzing narrative discourse, with examples from children with CHI.