Coherence, cohesion, and declarative memory: Discourse patterns in patients with hippocampal amnesia

Defined as surface indicators of relations within and between sentences (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), cohesive ties are a linguistic device that gives our communication continuity, allowing us to make connections across utterances, speakers, and topics. Given that we routinely return to and elaborate on conversations across long stretches of interaction (days and longer), cohesive ties also link our communicative histories across time.

• Investigations of discourse cohesion, and coherence, have been fruitful in indentifying discourse level impairments in individuals with various cognitive-communication impairments (e.g., TBI, dementia).

• Deficits in working memory (e.g, Dijkstra et al., 2004; Youse & Coelho, 2005), executive function (e.g., Glosser & Deser, 1990), and broad cognitive dysfunction (e.g., Davis & Coelho, 2004) have all been associated with impairments in cohesion and coherence in patients with TBI and dementia.

• We believe there are compelling reasons to investigate the contribution of declarative memory to cohesion and coherence. Taking advantage of a rare patient group with selective and severe declarative memory impairments, the current study is an attempt to isolate the contribution of declarative memory to cohesion and coherence in discourse.