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Abstract
Functionally relevant assessment of the language production of speakers with aphasia should include assessment of connected speech production. Despite the ecological validity of everyday conversations, more controlled and monological types of texts may be easier to obtain and analyse in clinical practice. This article discusses some simple measurements for the analysis of semi-spontaneous oral text production by speakers with aphasia. Specifically, the measurements are related to the production of verbs and nouns, and the realization of different sentence types. The proposed measurements should be clinically relevant, easily applicable, and linguistically meaningful. The measurements have been applied to oral descriptions of the ‘Cookie Theft’ picture by eight monolingual Norwegian speakers, four with an anomic type of aphasia and four without any type of language impairment. Despite individual differences in both the clinical and the non-clinical group, most of the measurements seem to distinguish between speakers with and without aphasia.
Acknowledgements
We wish to acknowledge the participation of the informants in this study. We thank SLTs Line Haaland-Johansen and Torunn Skaue for assistance with collecting the data from two of the speakers with aphasia. A preliminary version of this study was presented at ICPLA 12 in Istanbul, 25–28 June 2008, and we thank the participants at the conference as well as two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions for improvement.
Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.
Notes
1. Guidelines on collection and transcription of the data are not included in the present article. For a useful collection of articles on clinical transcription, see Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 16(5).
2. These data are part of a larger—yet to be completed—database of oral text productions by Norwegian speakers with and without aphasia.
3. It varies to what extent linguistics is part of the education of speech and language therapists. In Norway, there is a strong tradition for putting more emphasis on pedagogical theories than on linguistics.
4. The verb and sentence test (VAST) has been translated, adapted, and standardized for Norwegian (Bastiaanse, Lind, Moen, and Simonsen, Citation2006).
5. Psycholinguistic assessments of language processing in aphasia (PALPA) has been translated, adapted, and standardized for Norwegian (Kay, Lesser, and Coltheart, Citation2009).
6. http://www.hf.uio.no/tekstlab/frekvensordlister/index.html. Such frequency lists are not yet available for Norwegian spoken language corpora.
7. An electronically searchable version of this dictionary is available online at: http://www.dokpro.uio.no/ordboksoek.html
8. The method developed by Saffran et al. (Citation1989) was intended to capture features of agrammatic speech production, and it has been demonstrated to be less useful for analysis of fluent aphasic speech (Edwards, Citation1995). Another method for analysis of verbs and verb-argument structures in (primarily) agrammatic speech production has been proposed by Thompson, Shapiro, Li, and Schendel (Citation1995). Their procedure is based upon Saffran et al. (Citation1989).
9. As mentioned, we code subordinate clauses as part of a main clause. However, clauses with subordinate clause structure which do not belong to an explicit main clause are coded as sentence fragments.
10. All the examples are authentic ones, from the Norwegian ‘Cookie Theft’ descriptions. Glosses and/or transcriptions are presented underneath the original text.
11. For other types of analyses the distribution of different types of pauses is obviously relevant.
12. Simpler phrase structures (e.g. fewer adjectival modifiers in noun phrases) is a further factor which may influence the length of the syntactic units. So far we have not looked at this factor in our data.
13. As part of a larger Norwegian project on semi-spontaneous oral text production in aphasia, we plan to develop a training programme for speech and language therapists in lexical and syntactic analysis of oral texts. Results of this training, including data on inter-rater reliability, will eventually be published.