Story Grammar Analysis in Persons with Mild Aphasia

Richardson, Jessica D. and Hudspeth, Sarah Grace (2014) Story Grammar Analysis in Persons with Mild Aphasia. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]

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Abstract

Narratives are often the basis of daily conversational interactions. When narrative skills are compromised, functional conversation is negatively impacted. Narrative coherence can be impacted even in clinical populations with mild word-finding deficits, such as anomic aphasia (Andreetta, Cantagallo, & Marini, 2012). The narrative abilities of those individuals who have had a stroke (and perhaps a previous aphasia diagnosis) but who perform within the normal range on standardized aphasia assessment measures have not been characterized. As every clinician/clinical researcher knows, this subgroup still includes individuals who have difficulty in conversation, who cannot return to work, and whose life participation is negatively impacted. Using AphasiaBank categorization (as this study relies on AphasiaBank transcripts), we refer to this subgroup as “not aphasic by WAB” (NABW). In both persons with anomic aphasia (PWaAs) and NABWs, deficits may be so minor that they are not apparent on traditional standardized assessment measures, but it should not be assumed that they do not exist and do not affect functional communication abilities. Unfortunately, there is often very little help to be offered for this population. In order to continue progressive development of interventions for PWaAs and NABWs, more information regarding narrative strengths and weaknesses in this population is needed. Story grammar analysis is a well-known method of analyzing narrative discourse in several clinical populations and is likely to be sensitive to differences between closely matched groups. The specific aims of this study are to 1) determine if there are differences between PWaAs, NABW, and non-brain injured controls (NBIs) on production of story grammar components during retelling of the Cinderella story, and 2) to examine the relationship between story grammar measures and an easily and quickly derived discourse measure called CoreLex to further characterize the relationship between micro- and macro-level processes in persons with mild aphasia.

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