Abstract
This study investigated the communicative activities of 42 dysphasic stroke patients who were living at home. Two aspects of natural communication were surveyed: the conversational communication which occurs with the social contacts of the subject, and the communicative activities of daily living. The two aims of the study were to investigate the relevance of a selection of communicative activities of daily living, and to investigate possible grading of activities so that a representative sample of everyday activities may be used in the assessment and treatment of dysphasia.
Individuals showed wide variation in their communicative needs. These needs may not be met in the traditional linguistic speech therapy regimen. It is suggested that the use of an interview schedule like that used in this survey may serve as a starting point in the treatment of functional communication skills in dysphasic adults. Guttman scale analysis showed that communicative activities of daily living do not form a unidimensional scale. A representative sampling of activities, however, may be possible using the hierarchies of familiarity and difficulty obtained.
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