LAUSR

Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) are not uniformly represented across monolinguals and bilinguals. Processing speed is often impacted as a result of a TBI. The objective of this study is to examine how processing speed is influenced by linguistic abilities after sustaining a TBI. Hypothesis: bilinguals will perform better than monolinguals on measures of processing speed. A total of 89 subjects, 36 monolinguals with a mean age of 37.83 (SD = 13.25) and 53 bilinguals with a mean age of 37.74 (SD = 13.53) were grouped based on language ability and performance was compared on the Trail Making Test, Part-A (TMT-A), Processing Speed Index (PSI) of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, 4th Edition (WAIS-IV), and the Symbol Search (SS) and Coding (CD) subtests of the PSI. An independent samples t-test revealed a significant different between bilinguals and monolinguals on TMT-A [t (87) = .154, p = .003], CD subtest [t (87) = −.823, p = .008], and PSI [t (87) = −2.10, p = .014]. There was not a significant difference observed on the SS subtest [t (87) = −2.71, p = .364]. This study revealed that bilinguals demonstrated better performance on measures that emphasize scanning, cognitive flexibility, sequencing abilities, and visual–spatial functioning. These data suggest that bilinguals perform at an average level while monolinguals perform on a low average level regarding processing speed after sustaining a TBI.