The university’s Department of Communication Disorders investigates a wide range of speech and language disorders arising from cognitive change including traumatic brain injury.
A BIONIC (Brain Injury Outcomes New Zealand in the Community) study, published in international medical journal The Lancet, has estimated more than 36,000 new traumatic brain injuries occur in New Zealand each year. The rate of injury is far higher than in other developed parts of the world.
There is little significant research on adolescent traumatic brain injury but University of Canterbury postgraduate student Ruth Ramsay investigated this area supervised by the Dean of Science, Associate Professor Catherine Moran. Ramsay is a clinical educator specialising in childhood communication disorders.
“Teens have a specific skill set required to achieve at high school and university and having a traumatic brain injury with any of the above difficulties is a huge barrier to success,’’ Ramsay says.
“Teenagers who sustain a moderate to severe head injury can experience a number of changes which can last months, years or a lifetime. These students are affected by changes in processing higher level brain tasks such as attention, sequencing, planning, problem solving and memory.
“My study explored the ability of how young people understood and remembered what others said. Those with traumatic brain injury had poorer working memory and inferior listening skills.
“This means that they may need more processing time than their peers in testing situations and also with original creations such as stories, essays and other written material.
“On the positive side those who participated in our research were good at drawing on their general world knowledge to support their answers to listening comprehension questions during the testing.
“These findings allow clinicians to support clients in drawing on their strengths and also addressing difficulty. More research is needed to expand these findings and to look at developing strategies to help them succeed in education and their futures,” Ramsay says.