Vague retellings of personal narratives in temporal lobe epilepsy

Aside 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. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Funding Statement This study did not receive any funding. The first author was supported by the Research Training Program Stipend, awarded by the Commonwealth Government of Australia via The University of Melbourne ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below: Ethics committee of Melbourne Health, The Royal Melbourne Hospital (Victoria, Australia) gave ethical approval for this work. Granted under National Mutual Acceptance scheme. I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines and uploaded the relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material as supplementary files, if applicable. Yes All data produced in the present study are available upon reasonable request to the authors