Word association behaviors of survivors of severe traumatic brain injury

Cognitive-communication deficits displayed by survivors of severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) often include semantic processing problems. To better understand changes in semantic organization and retrieval that may result from TBI, the word association responses of 16 TBI survivors were compared with those of 16 neurologically intact adults of similar age. Participants provided word associations to 32 words from the categories of abstract and concrete nouns, verbs, functors, and adjectives. Dependent measures included response latency, response errors, grammatical class maintenance, response popularity, and response idiosyncrasy. Results indicated that both participant group membership and grammatical class of stimulus words significantly affected the generation of word associations; interaction effects revealed that participants with and without TBI performed comparably across stimulus categories in terms of reaction time and popular responses but not in terms of error responses, idiosyncratic responses, or grammatical class maintenance. The results were interpreted according to possible changes in the way adults with cognitive-communication deficits secondary to TBI organize and access semantic information.