Article
Quantifying connected discourse in Spanish-speaking individuals with aphasia: The case of mixed aphasias
Highlights
Characterization of mixed cases of aphasia, the most commonly attested in clinical practice.
Comparison of measurements at the sentence, word, and inflectional levels.
Group and single case comparisons.
Background: The relationship between spontaneous speech and formal language testing in people with brain tumors (gliomas) has been rarely studied. In clinical practice, formal testing is typically used, while spontaneous speech is less often evaluated quantitatively. However, spontaneous speech is quicker to sample and may be less prone to test/retest effects, making it a potential candidate for assessing language impairments when there is restricted time or when the patient is unable to undertake prolonged testing.
Aim: To assess whether quantitative spontaneous speech analysis and formal testing detect comparable language impairments in people with gliomas. Specifically, we addressed (a) whether both measures detected comparable language impairments in our patient sample; and (b) which language levels, assessment times, and spontaneous speech variables were more often impaired in this subject group.
Method: Five people with left perisylvian gliomas performed a spontaneous speech task and a formal language assessment. Tests were administered before surgery, within a week after surgery, and seven months after surgery. Performance on spontaneous speech was compared with that of 15 healthy speakers.
Results: Language impairments were detected more often with both measures than with either measure independently. Lexical–semantic impairments were more common than phonological and grammatical impairments, and performance was equally impaired across assessment time points. Incomplete sentences and phonological paraphasias were the most common error types.
Conclusions: In our sample both spontaneous speech analysis and formal testing detected comparable language impairments. Currently, we suggest that formal testing remains overall the better option, except for cases in which there are restrictions on testing time or the patient is too tired to undergo formal testing. In these cases, spontaneous speech may provide a viable alternative, particularly if automated analysis of spontaneous speech becomes more readily available in the future. These results await replication in a bigger sample and/or other populations.
The present work is dedicated to the role of gestures in overcoming lexical access problems in patients with motor aphasia. The study is based on a corpus of narratives by brain-damaged individuals – «Russian CliPS» (Clinical Pear Stories), the videos from which were annotated in the linguistic annotator «ELAN», with the gestural layout included in the analysis. The results suggest that most often the difficulties with lexical access were related to the search for nouns and verbs, and gestures (deictic and rhythmic gestures, beats) facilitated lexical access in patients.
Currently there is a need for standardized language assessment test in Russian. Our group has developed Russian Aphasia Test (RAT) based on modern psycholinguistic models and psychometric principles, taking into account existing standardized tests in other languages. RAT allows to separately assess each level of linguistic processing: from phonemic perception to discourse. Here we present the design of the test and the first results of its approbation in groups of neurologically healthy participants and individuals with aphasia. Preliminary results demonstrated that the test is sensitive to language deficits and their severity. Thus, RAT is a practical instrument for language assessment in aphasia which can be used both in clinical practice and for research purposes. At present test standardization in a large group of participants with and without aphasia is on-going with the goal of developing appropriate clinical and age norms.
RaPID-3 aims to be an interdisciplinary forum for researchers to share information, findings, methods, models and experience on the collection and processing of data produced by people with various forms of mental, cognitive, neuropsychiatric, or neurodegenerative impairments, such as aphasia, dementia, autism, bipolar disorder, Parkinson's disease or schizophrenia. Particularly, the workshop's focus is on creation, processing and application of data resources from individuals at various stages of these impairments and with varying degrees of severity. Creation of resources includes e.g. annotation, description, analysis and interpretation of linguistic, paralinguistc and extra-linguistic data (such as spontaneous spoken language, transcripts, eyetracking measurements, wearable and sensor data, etc). Processing is done to identify, extract, correlate, evaluate and disseminate various linguistic or multimodal phenotypes and measurements, which then can be applied to aid diagnosis, monitor the progression or predict individuals at risk.
The present study aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the impact of discourse-linking deficits on the performance of individuals with aphasia by providing new data from a set of rarely investigated constructions: sentences in which a clitic pronoun coexists alongside with the full DP it agrees with. To do so, we use data of individuals with non-fluent aphasias who need to overcome the difficulties in direct object (accusative) clitic production. This results in overproduction of non-target clitic right dislocations (RDs) and clitic doubling (CD). Data from 15 individual’s native speakers of Spanish and Catalan are discussed. Data complement the results of previous investigations on discourse-linking effects in these languages, allowing the interpretation of results across constructions.