Word-finding in confrontation naming and picture descriptions produced by individuals with early post-stroke aphasia

Abstract

Objective: The present study aims to assess the relationship between quantitative measures of connected speech production and performance in confrontation naming in early post-stroke aphasia (8-14 days post-stroke). Method: We collected connected speech samples elicited by a picture description task and administered a confrontation naming task to 20 individuals with early post-stroke aphasia and 20 healthy controls. Transcriptions were made in compliance with the CHAT format guidelines. Several micro- (i.e. duration, total number of words, words per minute, mean length of utterances, ratio of open- to closed-class words and noun-to-verb ratio, VOC-D, repetitions, self-corrections, and phonological and semantic errors) and macrolinguistic (i.e. informativeness and efficiency) measures were extracted. Results: We provide evidence for the presence of impairments in an array of micro- and macrolinguistic measures of speech in individuals with early post-stroke aphasia. We show that in the patient group, confrontation naming abilities most strongly relate to informativeness in a picture description task. Conclusion: Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between performance in confrontation naming and in connected speech production in the first days after stroke onset and also suggest that discourse analysis may provide unique, possibly more complex information.

Keywords:

• Early post-stroke aphasia
• word-finding
• confrontation naming
• connected speech
• picture description

Acknowledgements

SB and KM hold a Career Award from Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Santé.

AB holds a scholarship from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Santé.

JB holds a scholarship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada [grant number G-16-00014039] and the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant Program [grant number RGPIN-2015-05297].