LAUSR

The conversational language of individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is circumstantial. The micro- and macrolinguistic underpinnings of this disturbance in narrative discourse, and the role of epilepsy and cognitive variables warrants exploration. We examined the elicited narrative output of 15 surgically-naive individuals with TLE and 14 healthy controls. To replicate and extend Field and colleagues' (2000) work, participants were shown an eight-frame cartoon Cowboy Story from Joanette and colleagues (1986) and were asked to produce five immediately consecutive elicitations of the narrative. Following transcription and coding, detailed multi-level discourse analysis demonstrated a typical pattern of compression across repetitions in controls. They produce increasingly concise and coherent output, reflective of a refined mental representation of the narrative, while individuals with TLE fail to do so. The narratives produced by individuals with TLE do not compromise the essential story components, although they are less informative overall: producing fewer novel units, and introducing more content that is repetitive, extraneous, and does not progress the narrative. Their narratives are ultimately less fluent, less cohesive, and less coherent relative to controls. Change across trials suggests that there are significant group by trial interactions in sample length, spontaneous duration, and total statements, which are not explained by seizure burden, age, or lexical retrieval deficits among those with TLE. These findings replicate the pattern of findings previously identified by Field and colleagues (2000), with novel insights into the macrolinguistic disturbances that characterise their narrative discourse over sequential repetitions. These findings suggest that individuals with TLE do not benefit from repeated engagement with a narrative in the same way that neurologically normal individuals do. We conclude that disturbances to social cognition and ultimately pragmatics in TLE might underpin inefficiencies in their communication.