An analysis of topics and vocabulary in Chinese oral narratives by normal speakers and speakers with fluent aphasia

Discourse Task Type-Specific Linguistic Characteristics in Anomic Aphasia and Healthy Controls: Evidence From Mandarin-Chinese AphasiaBank

PURPOSE

This study was designed to examine the hypothesis that discourse task types influence language performance in Mandarin Chinese-speaking people and to reveal the discourse task-specific linguistic properties of persons with anomic aphasia compared to neurotypical controls.

METHOD

Language samples from persons with aphasia (n = 31) and age- and education-matched controls (n = 31) across four discourse tasks (sequential-picture description, single-picture description, story narrative, and procedural discourse) were collected from Mandarin AphasiaBank. Task-specific distributions of parts of speech were analyzed using mosaic plots. The main effects of tasks in each group and the between-group differences within each task for several typical linguistic variables were evaluated, including the mean length of utterance, tokens, moving-average type-token ratio, words per minute, propositional density, noun-verb ratio, noun percentage, and verb percentage.

RESULTS

The results revealed an impact of discourse tasks on most language variables in both groups. In the healthy controls, story narratives yielded the highest total words and lowest verb percentage. In the aphasia group, procedural discourse elicited the fewest total words and densest expressions, whereas their single-picture descriptions had the highest noun-verb ratio. For all tasks, the aphasia group performed worse than the control group in the mean length of utterance, tokens, moving-average type-token ratio, and words per minute. For noun-verb ratio, noun percentage, and verb percentage, only one task (i.e., single-picture description) showed significant between-group differences.

CONCLUSION

The selection of discourse tasks should be addressed in assessments and interventions for Mandarin Chinese-speaking individuals with aphasia to obtain more accurate and feasible outcomes.

Applying core lexicon analysis in patients with anomic aphasia: Based on Mandarin AphasiaBank

BACKGROUND

Patients with anomic aphasia experience difficulties in narrative processing. General discourse measures are time consuming and require necessary skills. Core lexicon analysis has been proposed as an effort-saving approach but has not been developed in Mandarin discourse.

AIMS

This exploratory study was aimed (1) to apply core lexicon analysis in Mandarin patients with anomic aphasia at the discourse level and (2) to verify the problems with core words among people with anomic aphasia.

METHODS & PROCEDURE

The core nouns and verbs were extracted from narrative language samples from 88 healthy participants. The production of core words for 12 anomic aphasia and 12 age- and education-matched controls were then calculated and compared. The correlation between the percentages and the Aphasia Quotients of the revised Western Aphasia Battery was analyzed as well.

OUTCOMES & RESULTS

The core nouns and verbs were successfully extracted. Patients with anomic aphasia produced fewer core words than healthy people, and the percentages differed significantly in different tasks as well as word classes. There was no correlation between the core lexicon use and the severity of aphasia in patients with anomic aphasia.

CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS

Core lexicon analysis may potentially serve as a clinician-friendly manner of quantifying core words produced at the discourse level in Mandarin patients with anomic aphasia.

WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS

What is already known on the subject Discourse analyses in aphasia assessment and treatment have increasingly garnered attention. Core lexicon analysis based on English AphasiaBank has been reported in recent years. It is correlated with microlinguistic and macrolinguistic measures in aphasia narratives. Nevertheless, the application based on Mandarin AphasiaBank is still under development in healthy individuals and patients with anomic aphasia. What this paper adds to existing knowledge A Mandarin core lexicon set was developed for different tasks. The feasibility of core lexicon analysis to evaluate the corpus of patients with anomic aphasia was preliminarily discussed and the speech performance of patients and healthy people was then compared to provide a reference for the evaluation and treatment of clinical aphasia corpus. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? The purpose of this exploratory study was to consider the potential use of core lexicon analysis to evaluate core word production in narrative discourse. Moreover, normative and aphasia data were provided for comparison to develop clinical use for Mandarin patients with anomic aphasia.

Core lexicon in aphasia: A longitudinal study

Background

General consensus exists between clinicians as to the incorporation of discourse outcome measures into language assessment for persons with aphasia (PWA). The development of core lexicon measures (CoreLex) has enabled clinicians to reduce time and labor intensive preparatory work for discourse analysis, which has been considered as an alternative measure to quantify word retrieval ability in discourse in a clinical context. Although previous studies have investigated the quality of the measure, CoreLex has rarely been longitudinally explored.

Aims

We aimed to investigate the adequacy of CoreLex to document linguistic changes in PWA over time. Specifically, we examined (1) whether natural language recovery from acute to chronic stages is manifested differentially by tasks and (2) the extent to which the ability to retrieve words in isolation predicts the ability to retrieve words in context.

Methods

A total of 19 PWA participated in the study. They completed a language assessment including confrontation naming tasks (Boston Naming Test [BNT] and Hopkins Action Naming Assessment [HANA]) and a picture description task using the Cookie Theft picture at acute and chronic stages. Discourse samples from the picture description task were quantified using CoreLex.

Results

We found significant differences across tasks and time-points by PWA. Moderate correlations between the confrontation naming tasks and CoreLex were found at the acute stage but not at the chronic stage. Additionally, McNemar's tests demonstrated a significant difference in PWA's performance in CoreLex from the acute to the chronic stages.

Conclusions

Our findings show that performance by PWA improves over time on all tasks, but language gains are manifested differentially by tasks. Performance in confrontation naming moderately predicts word retrieval in context acutely. However, lack of correlations between confrontation naming tasks and CoreLex later endorse inadequacy of using confrontation naming tasks as a proxy measure for discourse-level performance and improvement for PWA.

"If You Just Stay With Me and Wait…You'll Get an Idea of What I'm Saying": The Communicative Benefits of Time for Conversational Self-Repair for People With Aphasia

PURPOSE

This study investigated the communicative benefits of self-repair during conversation for persons with aphasia (PWAs). Self-repair of trouble sources is an interactional priority that emphasizes autonomy and competence. Of equal importance, conversationalists desire to minimize silences and work together to ensure forward movement (progressivity) of conversation. Simultaneously achieving progressivity and self-repair is challenging in aphasia, and PWAs and their partners often make trade-off decisions between these two activities. Conversation-level aphasia interventions usually focus on supportive techniques that promote participation while maintaining progressivity, effectively favoring progressivity over self-repair. This study evaluates the benefits of an alternative approach that shifts the emphasis to self-repair, thereby highlighting potential trade-off costs of routinely forgoing self-repair to achieve progressivity.

METHOD

Ten people with mild-to-moderate aphasia each held two conversations with two different partners. When trouble sources characterized by silent and/or filled pauses occurred, partners maintained a supportive and engaged stance, allowing PWAs time to self-repair. We analyzed language produced during these "edited turns" using three paradigms considering form, content, and use.

RESULTS

The data yielded 311 edited turns. For form, on average, each edited turn resulted in 3.72 words; for content, most edited turns contained autobiographical information; for use, approximately 40% of edited turns introduced new information, and 40% added to the ongoing topic. The remainder were either ambiguous or comments such as, "I can't think of it."

CONCLUSIONS

When given engaged support and time to self-repair, PWAs contributed meaningful personal information to conversations for approximately 80% of edited turns. Importantly, self-repair often resulted in self-expression that directed the conversation, which is a communicative role critical for empowering agency and identity. This research opens a dialogue about benefits and limitations of approaches that prioritize either progressivity or self-repair and how to balance the two to optimize therapeutic benefits for each individual.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.19379738.

Toward Empowering Conversational Agency in Aphasia: Understanding Mechanisms of Topic Initiation in People With and Without Aphasia

PURPOSE

This study examined topic initiation (TI) in conversations involving people with aphasia (PWA), matched people without aphasia (M-PWoA), and speech-language pathologists who were their conversation partners (SLP-Ps). For each speaker type, we analyzed patterns of distribution of typical mechanisms of TI and patterns of simultaneous use of multiple TI mechanisms. Lastly, we examined associations between use of simultaneous TI mechanisms and communicative success.

METHOD

Twenty PWA and 20 M-PWoA each participated in two conversations with SLP-Ps. Conversation samples were analyzed for TI locations and mechanisms, with results tallied for each speaker type following a published typology. A measure of communicative success was applied to TI utterances. Rank-order correlations were conducted to evaluate the patterns of distribution of the TI mechanisms between speaker types and the patterns of multiple mechanism usage between speaker types. Descriptive analysis was conducted to provide additional insight to the TI behaviors of each speaker type and to evaluate the relationship between multiple TI mechanisms and communicative success.

RESULTS

All speaker types used cohesion most often to achieve TI. PWA used an abrupt method of TI (noncoherent TI) more often than other speaker types. A single mechanism of TI was used most often by all speaker types, except for SLP-Ps when they were in conversations with PWA. In this case, SLP-Ps most often used two or more layered mechanisms of TI. SLP-Ps also used a highly salient TI mechanism with greater frequency when speaking with PWA than observed between other speaker types. When PWA layered mechanisms of TI, they appeared to be more likely to achieve better communicative success.

CONCLUSIONS

Specific, teachable behaviors such as favoring certain TI mechanisms and using multiple TI mechanisms may improve communicative success during TI for PWA. Furthermore, findings suggest that SLP-Ps modify their TI behaviors when speaking to PWA.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.17699423.

Cantonese AphasiaBank: An annotated database of spoken discourse and co-verbal gestures by healthy and language-impaired native Cantonese speakers

This article reports the construction of a multimodal annotated database of spoken discourse and co-verbal gestures by native healthy speakers of Cantonese and individuals with language impairment: the Cantonese AphasiaBank. This corpus was established as a foundation for aphasiologists and clinicians to use in designing and conducting research investigations into theoretical and clinical issues related to acquired language disorders in Chinese. Details in terms of the purpose, structure, and levels of annotation of the database (containing part-of-speech-annotated orthographic transcripts with Romanization and the corresponding videos) are described. The discussion presents the challenges of building a spoken database of a language that is not linguistically well-researched and that does not have a standardized written form for many of its lexical items, as well as presenting how these issues were addressed. Most importantly, the article highlights the potential of Cantonese AphasiaBank as a powerful research tool for linguists and psycholinguists.