A linguistic communication measure for aphasic narratives

Abstract

This paper presents a linguistic communication measure (LCM) for analysis of transcriptions of aphasic and other disordered narratives. The LCM responds to three clinically important dimensions of narrative language production: the amount of information that the patient can convey in words, the proportion of informative to non-informative words produced, and the grammaticality of the expression. The measure is designed for evaluating patient progress or deterioration in either research or general clinical settings. It can be applied rapidly to any fairly short transcribed narrative text whose target meaning is known to the examiner (e.g. the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (1983) ‘Cookie Theft’ picture). The LCM requires only a short rater training period, appears to be reliable, and accords with clinical intuitions about the nature of aphasic patients' communicative difficulties, although full psychometric calibration and validation of the tool have yet to be undertaken.