Script-event representation in patients with severe traumatic brain injury

The aim of the present study was to examine the syntactic and semantic dimensions of script representation in patients with structural damage within the cerebral cortex following a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Forty TBI patients and 38 healthy control subjects (HC) were asked to sort cards describing actions belonging to eight scripts according to the script to which they belonged and according to their order of execution. Each script included actions which were low in centrality and distinctiveness (NCA & NDA), and high in centrality (CA), distinctiveness (DA), and CA and DA. Actions were presented in three conditions. In the scripts with headers (SH) condition, the actions were given with each script header written on a separate card. In the scripts without headers condition (SwH) no script header was provided. In the scripts with distractor header (SDH) condition, the actions were given with each script header and a distractor header written on separate cards. The results showed that performance of TBI patients was significantly lower in all conditions. Overall, TBI patients made significantly more sequencing and sorting errors (for all types of actions) than HC subjects. These data are consistent with the view that TBI produces impairment of both the syntactic and semantic dimensions of script representation.