Evidence of the Bilingual Advantage in Young Adults with Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: A Linguistic Analysis

Research Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the differences in story-telling in bilingual and monolingual young adults with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). This exploratory analysis aimed to determine the effect of bilingualism on language production by comparing performance on linguistic features on a standardized story elicitation task.

Design: Prospective, observational study.

Setting: Participants were community-dwelling young adults. All study measures were completed in a laboratory setting in a university.

Participants: Participants included sixteen self-identified bilingual (n=8) and monolingual individuals (n=8) with an average age of twenty-one. Language and TBI status were verified using an adapted form of the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (Marian et al., 2007) and a clinical interview, respectively.

Interventions: Participants were prompted to retell the Cinderella story from the TBI Bank protocol using elicitation procedures described in MacWhinney et al. (2011) Procedures can be located at: https://tbi.talkbank.org. Transcripts of the participant’s responses were coded in Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN; MacWhinney, 2017) Linguistic coding was extracted from transcripts using the MOR and EVAL programs (MacWhinney, 2017).

Main Outcome Measures: Linguistic variables reflecting language productivity were chosen in line with prior work on discourse after mTBI (Norman et al., 2022).

Results: A Mann-Whitney U Test was conducted to determine rank differences between the two groups on measures of linguistic components. Significant differences (p <.05) were found between the two groups on the following variables: percent of nouns in the samples, the overall distribution of nouns over verbs and number of retracings. All other variable comparisons were non-significant.

Conclusions: This exploratory study of bilingual language performance after mTBI demonstrates preliminary evidence that in young adults who have incurred mTBI, language recovery might favor those who speak a second language, regardless of age of acquisition. However, this work remains in the early stages and continued research using more robust population samples is warranted. Given the growing population of bilingual speakers in the United States and worldwide, continued research investigating these outcomes is important. This knowledge will provide more informed approaches to treatment and rehabilitation.

Author(s) Disclosures: The authors have no relevant material or financial interests to disclose.