Vague retellings of personal narratives in temporal lobe epilepsy

Abstract

AbstractAside from deficits identified in lexical retrieval, individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) exhibit clinical oddities, such as circumstantiality in their language production. This becomes particularly evident when elicitation tasks impose minimal structure, or when impersonal narratives are retold over consecutive occasions. Personal reminiscence is highly specific and localised in time, placing specific demands on cognitive-linguistic systems. It is presumed that the nature of this elicitation paradigm will produce a unique psycholinguistic phenotype in those with TLE. Among controls there is a compression of output for impersonal narratives, but the opposite effect when personal narratives are retold. To investigate the micro- and macrolinguistic processes underpinning personal discourse production in TLE, we examined the elicited language output of in 15 surgically naïve individuals with TLE and 14 healthy controls. Participants were asked to recall and re-tell an autobiographical memory on four immediately consecutive occasions, representing an alternative unstructured elicitation. Following transcription and coding of output, a detailed multi-level discourse analysis of output volume, fluency, cohesion, and coherence was conducted. There were significant group by trial interactions for the number of novel units, the number of non-progression units, and for the proportion of non-progression to novel content. As anticipated, a distinctly different pattern emerged in TLE when compared with controls who did not compress their output volume across repetitions but instead produced greater novelty, and a more coherent and refined account over time. Individuals with TLE consistently told a less distinct story across repetitions, with disturbances in fluency, cohesion, and coherence. This reflects a reduced capacity to produce a coherent mental representation, in all likelihood related to the neurolinguistic demands of recalling and retelling specific personal events.