PRIMARY OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to investigate the factors that might have a negative influence on auditory processing and higher-level language processing in the US veterans of the recent foreign wars (Iraq and Afghanistan). RESEARCH DESIGN Exploratory, cross-sectional, correlational, prospective, cohort-design. METHODS AND PROCEDURES The experimental group consisted of 12 US veterans of war (10 males and 2 females) with blast exposure. The control group consisted of six US veterans (5 males and 1 female) without the history of blast exposure. Both groups were matched in mean age. Both groups were tested on Boston Assessment of Traumatic Brain Injury, Consonant Trigrams Test, Symbol Digit Modality Test, Trail Making Test, SCAN-3, CELF-5-Metalinguistics, CASL, and an unpublished test on the processing of sentence prosody. MAIN OUTCOMES AND RESULTS Significant group differences in attention, and time-compressed sentence processing were found. For those veterans (in the experimental group) who were not wearing their helmets at the time of blast, additional significant differences were noted with inferencing and auditory figure-ground tasks. CONCLUSIONS Findings support the importance of including speech/language pathologists in all stages of recovery for veterans post-blast exposure.

中文翻译：

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探索美国退伍军人爆炸性脑损伤后高级语言理解能力缺陷及其影响因素。

主要目的本研究的目的是调查可能对近期外国战争（伊拉克和阿富汗）的美国退伍军人的听觉处理和高级语言处理产生负面影响的因素。研究设计探索性，横断面，相关性，前瞻性，队列设计。方法和程序实验组由12名美国爆炸军人（10名男性和2名女性）组成。对照组由六名没有爆炸史的美国退伍军人组成（5名男性和1名女性）。两组均在平均年龄匹配。两组患者均接受了波士顿创伤性脑损伤评估，辅音Trigrams测试，符号数字模态测试，跟踪制作测试，SCAN-3，CELF-5-Metalinguistics，CASL以及未发表的句子韵律处理测试。主要结果和结果发现在注意力上存在显着的群体差异，并且发现了时间压缩的句子处理。对于在爆炸时没有戴头盔的那些退伍军人（在实验组中），在推理和听觉上的图形基础任务上还注意到了其他显着差异。结论研究结果支持在言语/语言病理学家在爆炸后暴露的退伍军人恢复的所有阶段的重要性。