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Discourse Production Before and After Brain Tumor Removal: Evidence from Three Elicitation Tasks
The purpose of the present study was to examine discourse production in people with left hemisphere brain tumors before and after surgery. Discourse samples were collected from 21 patients by using three elicitation tasks: personal stories, sequential pictures and procedural pictures. The patients’ results were compared with the results of the normative sample of 73 people in four age groups. Our analysis of characteristics such as total number of tokens, articulatory speech rate, median length of absolute pauses and lexical diversity revealed that there was no significant difference between the results in pre- and post surgical periods in patients who demonstrated improvement or remained unchanged after surgery. Interestingly, we found a significant difference in the total number of tokens before and after surgery in the group of patients with overall language deterioration.