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Psycholinguistic Analysis of Aphasic Language: Theoretical Formulations and Procedures
Abstract
This paper presents the background, rationale, and examples for a comprehensive psycholinguistic study of free speech samples obtained from 50 adult aphasics in comparison with those obtained from 50 adult normal speakers. Procedures developed for the recording, transcription, and coding of the speech samples and the analysis of the data with regard to measures of lexical diversity, morphological complexity and grammatical form-class usage, generative-syntactic complexity, sentence length, abnormal productions and of paralinguistic features (rate of speech, pauses, pause fillers, vocal gestures, etc.) are described. First results of a pilot study with 20 aphasic and 20 normal speakers are reported. Hypotheses of the project include differences between the linguistic performance of normal and aphasic speakers on a combination of variables as well as the existence of specific types of aphasia which can eventually be related to medical findings.
... A thorough literature search uncovers limited studies directly investigating the occurrence of silent pauses in patients with aphasia. Since the inaugural studies (7)(8)(9), contemporary research has revisited the importance of exploring silent pauses, with a particular focus on specific aspects such as frequency and duration (10) within distinct aphasia profiles (11). However, in these studies, very small sample sizes were assessed in district narrative tasks, highlighting the need for more extensive and inclusive investigations in this domain. ...
Introduction
Silent pauses are regarded as integral components of the temporal organization of speech. However, it has also been hypothesized that they serve as markers for internal cognitive processes, including word access, monitoring, planning, and memory functions. Although existing evidence across various pathological populations underscores the importance of investigating silent pauses’ characteristics, particularly in terms of frequency and duration, there is a scarcity of data within the domain of post-stroke aphasia.
Methods
The primary objective of the present study is to scrutinize the frequency and duration of silent pauses in two distinct narrative tasks within a cohort of 32 patients with chronic post-stroke aphasia, in comparison with a control group of healthy speakers. Subsequently, we investigate potential correlation patterns between silent pause measures, i.e., frequency and duration, across the two narrative tasks within the patient group, their performance in neuropsychological assessments, and lesion data.
Results
Our findings showed that patients exhibited a higher frequency of longer-duration pauses in both narrative tasks compared to healthy speakers. Furthermore, within-group comparisons revealed that patients tended to pause more frequently and for longer durations in the picture description task, while healthy participants exhibited the opposite trend. With regard to our second research question, a marginally significant interaction emerged between performance in semantic verbal fluency and the narrative task, in relation to the location of silent pauses—whether between or within clauses—predicting the duration of silent pauses in the patient group. However, no significant results were observed for the frequency of silent pauses. Lastly, our study identified that the duration of silent pauses could be predicted by distinct Regions of Interest (ROIs) in spared tissue within the left hemisphere, as a function of the narrative task.
Discussion
Overall, this study follows an integrative approach of linguistic, neuropsychological and neuroanatomical data to define silent pauses in connected speech, and illustrates interrelations between cognitive components, temporal aspects of speech, and anatomical indices, while it further highlights the importance of studying connected speech indices using different narrative tasks.
... The NDW of each language sample was divided by the sample's TNW. A larger TTR value implies greater diversity in vocabulary, while a smaller TTR value implies a more repetitious use of lexical items (Spreen & Wachal, 1973). This study was free from sample size bias in calculating the TTR (Fillenbaum et al., 1961;Hess et al., 1986) because all individual samples' TNWs were matched to 5,000 words. ...
Purpose
This study is aimed to identify the high-frequency vocabulary (HFV), otherwise termed “core vocabulary” for adults with complex communication needs.
Method
Three major characteristics of the HFV—a relatively small number of different words (NDW), a relatively high word frequency, and a high word commonality across speakers—were examined so as not to lose any candidate words for the HFV. Specifically, instead of applying the traditionally used cutoff word frequency of 0.5‰, a grouped frequency distribution was used to examine the appropriate frequency ranges to determine the HFV candidates. To improve the representativeness of the HFV across ages, social backgrounds, conversation situations, and topics, 330,000 spoken words of 66 adults (29 men and 37 women; M age = 45.47 years, SD = 16.07) were extracted from the British National Corpus database for analysis.
Results
A distinct pattern of NDW was observed from the frequency of 0.1‰ in the grouped frequency distribution. In total, 671 words were found to be candidates for the HFV, accounting for 90.94% of the total sample words. After the word commonality analysis indicated at least 80% commonality across speakers, 203 words were selected for the final HFV; accountability was calculated at 80.62%.
Conclusions
With the innovative word analysis approach, this study provided an HFV list that can be used for a wide range of conversation topics. This method provides a scientific and principled approach to identifying and organizing vocabulary for augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention that does not exist in many AAC resources that promote “core vocabulary” with identifying the source for vocabulary selection.
Testing of verbal abilities, in common with all neuropsychological evaluation, has two global purposes. The first purpose is in the clinical/diagnostic assessment of functional abilities. This dates from the work of Wernicke, Broca, and other physician-scientists of the nineteenth century who became interested in language disorders resulting from damage to the central nervous system. The clinical techniques administered at bedside have become the basis for a number of systematic language instruments currently available. The second major purpose of language testing is the experimental investigation of “brain-behavioral” relationships.
Background: Important to the assessment of aphasia are analyses of discourse production and, in particular, lexical diversity analyses of verbal production of adults with aphasia. Previous researchers have used type-token ratio (TTR) to measure conversational vocabulary in adults with aphasia; however, this measure is known to be sensitive to sample size, requiring that only samples of equivalent length be compared. The number of different words (NDW) is another measure of lexical diversity, but it also requires input samples of equivalent length. An alternative to these measures, D, has been developed (Malvern & Richards, 1997) to address this problem. D allows for comparisons across samples of varying lengths. Aims: The first objective of the current study was to examine the relationships among three measures of productive vocabulary in discourse for adults with aphasia: TTR, NDW, and D. The second objective was to use these measures to determine in what ways, and to what degree, they each can differentiate fluent and nonfluent aphasia. Methods & Procedures: Eighteen adults with aphasia participated in this study (nine with nonfluent aphasia; nine with fluent aphasia). Participants completed the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) and produced language samples consisting of conversation and picture description. Samples were then subjected to the three lexical diversity analyses. Outcomes & Results: Results indicated that, although the measures generally correlated with each other, adults with fluent aphasia evidenced significantly higher D and NDW values than those with nonfluent aphasia when whole samples were subjected to analyses. Once samples were truncated to 100- and 200-word samples, groups differed significantly for all three measures. Conclusions: These findings add further support to the notion that because TTR and, although to a lesser extent, NDW are sensitive to sample size, length differences across samples tend to confound results. As an alternative to these measures, the use of D for the measurement of conversational vocabulary of adults with aphasia enables the analysis of entire language samples, so that discarding language sample data is not necessary. In the present study, D values differed for fluent and nonfluent aphasia samples.
This chapter reviews primarily contemporary assessment techniques. The chapter delineates the purposes of assessment and testing including screening, diagnostic and descriptive assessments, and progress evaluation; the psycholinguistic evaluation of aphasic language; and the construction principles of aphasia tests including general requirements of reliability, validity, and standardization, and specific requirements for tests with brain-damaged and aphasic patients. In discussing current methods for the assessment of aphasia, a selective review provides introductory information to readers unfamiliar with some of the assessment procedures to help them choose those methods most likely to meet their needs. Information is also given on the test procedure itself, its psychometric properties, the theoretical position of the test authors, and the most likely areas of use. Methods for the assessment of aphasia in children are presented, and some general considerations regarding the assessment of aphasia in clinical practice are discussed. In particular, the authors discuss the decision-making process before, during, and after the clinical assessment for questions of diagnosis, treatment planning, and prediction of recovery. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Included are brief descriptions of investigations in electrophysiology, memory, aphasia, hemispheric asymmetries, developmental disabilities, learning disorders in children, hyperactivity and attentional disorders, and general neuropsychology. The work reviewed serves to illustrate the extensive commitment to research in human neuropsychology made by investigators in Canada. It is clear that continued Canadian leadership in this area can be expected to continue. (French abstract) (5 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A preliminary experiment was performed to discover what effect the topic of speech and repetition of recording session would have on the number of types in samples of spoken monologues. Ten normal subjects were recorded on three occasions, and on each occasion they spoke on three different topics for five minutes each, though two of the topics were constant across occasions. Despite the fact that the subjects felt they spoke more easily on one topic, that of their own choice, there was no evidence of a significant topic effect or an order effect upon measures closely related to the Type-Token Ratio. The conclusion was that sampling speech in this fashion is a suitable design to study changes in Type-Token Ratios where change over time due to specific causes (e.g. psychiatric illness, exhibition of drugs, etc.) is being investigated.
Rating scales were used to identify characteristic aphasic phenomena in a sample of natural language from aphasic patients. These variables were used to derive empirically four groups of aphasic patients. These groups showed significant multivariate differences on the basis of their performance on the Neurosensory Center Comprehensive Examination for Aphasia. Seven subtests showed significant univariate differences among the four groups: Visual Naming, Description of Use, Sentence Repetition, Repetition of Digits, Reversal of Digits, Identification by Sentence, and Oral Reading Sentences. Two of the groups reflected Howes dichotomy of articulate-nonarticulate language disorders. Another group was thought to reflect Schuell's single dimension of language disorders that could be differentiated only in terms of severity. Afourth group was characterized by a major impairment of memory. These results indicated that aphasic phenomena could be identified reliably on the basis of rating of verbal output on scales that reflect language disorders. These scales were used in a statistical fashion to derive empirically oriented groups that were identified on the basis of psychometric measures of language skills.
Various aspects of speech and language were compared, using psycholinguistic techniques, in a group of 15 depressed patients and 16 manic patients: lexical diversity, syntactical complexity, syntactical elements, and content analysis. Contrary to anticipation, the manic patients did not show more varied word choice or complexity of sentence structure than the depressives. In particular, they did not differ significantly in type-token ratio. The greatest difference was in syntactical elements, with manics using more action verbs, adjectives, and concrete nouns, while the depressed patients used more state of being verbs, modifying adverbs, first-person pronouns, and personal pronouns. When compared by content analysis, the manics used more words reflecting a concern with power and achievement. These results imply that depressive speech tends to be more vague and qualified and to show considerable self-preoccupation, while manic speech tends to be colorful and concrete and to show more concern with things than with people.
The verbal production of 57 aphasic patients was rated and used to assign these patients into two sets of groups reflecting Howes' and Weisenburg and McBride's models of aphasia. Test scores covering a broad range of communication skills and modalities were compared between these groups to examine the assumption that salient features of verbal production could be used to establish groups which would show significant differences on other important linguistic variables. Neither Howes' nor Weisenburg and McBride's model provided groups showing significant multivariate differences. It was suggested that these models be improved by expanding them to include other important psycholinguistic components of language skills. Since these models did not account for significant between group differences, caution was suggested in using these models for assessment or treatment purposes.
Thirty-eight measures of lexical diversity are obtained (with the aid of a computer) from the free speech of 20 aphasic and 20 normal control subjects. After statistical analyses of significance and redundancy, 18 variables are retained for a later empirical derivation of types of aphasia. Eight of the variables are sufficiently significant to discriminate the aphasic group from the normal group.
Schizophrenic speech was investigated at the moment of reading aloud paragraph-long stories and retelling them. Twenty white schizophrenic patients, with at least a high school diploma, were matched with 20 normals on the basis of race, educational level, sex, and age. Silent pauses (duration, frequency, and location), utterances (duration and syllable lengths, speech and articulation rates), and spoken hesitations (frequency and syllable lengths) were measured. When the semantic content of the stories did not agree with commonly held presuppositions, the speech characteristics of normals were analogues of the schizophrenic thought disorder.
The free speech of each of twelve adult aphasic patients was examined with reference particularly to (1) the distribution of words according to grammatical function, (2) sequential dependencies in form-class usage, and (3) stereotypy in vocabulary. The majority of the aphasic records departed considerably from normal usage (as defined by analysis of twelve control records), with similarity among some patients in the pattern of divergence. The measures used appear to be of particular value in revealing (i) semantic difficulties in word selection and (ii) difficulties in the sequencing of speech that occur along with syntactic losses.
This chapter presents a paper published by Harold Goodglass in 1958. Goodglass was among the first psychologists to investigate aphasia, and he should most likely be credited with introducing controlled experimental methods into the field. In one of his first studies, he operationalized an idea conveyed to him by Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist Morris Halle and, with the help of J. Hunt, incorporated the notion of grammatical transformation into an experiment of language production in aphasia. © 2006 by Yosef Grodzinsky and Katrin Amunts. All rights reserved.
Evidence from recent research suggests that aphasia patients may be distinguished, one from another, by assessing the extent to which their speech departs from normal in terms of frequencies of usage of words from various grammatical classes. A system is proposed for classifying words into distinct grammatical classes. The system is designed to provide ease of classification, for speech either from aphasic patients or normal speakers, and to entail consistent application of grammatical criteria. It lends itself to inclusion in a computer programme for processing English language texts. Some potential uses of the classification system are briefly noted.
A table of word frequencies derived from 250,000 words of recorded interviews with university students and hospital patients is presented. Data for subsamples of 100,000 words each from the student patient populations are also given to permit evaluation of their differences. A total of 9699 different words, of which 4097 occurred only once in the complete sample, are listed.
A system of 20 Fortran and PL/1 programs, developed for an analysis of aphasic and normal speech transcripts, is described in detail. The programs aid in lexical, grammatical, paralinguistic and statistical analyses, as well as in data preparation and correction. They can also be used in schizophrenic and other kinds of pathological language and are adaptable to the analysis of written-language samples and the investigation of authorship and style. (Author/FWB)
[This paper reports an exploratory investigation of hesitation phenomena in spontaneously spoken English. Following a brief review of the literature bearing on such phenomena, a quantitative study of filled and unfilled pauses, repeats, and false starts in the speech of some twelve participants in a conference is described. Analysis in terms of both individual differences and linguistic distribution is made, and some psycholinguistic implications are drawn, particularly as to the nature of encoding units and their relative uncertainty. A distinction between non-chance statistical dependencies and all-or-nothing dependencies in linguistic methodology is made.]
Thesis--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Microfilm of typescript.
Thirty-eight measures of lexical diversity are obtained (with the aid of a computer) from the free speech of 20 aphasic and 20 normal control subjects. After statistical analyses of significance and redundancy, 18 variables are retained for a later empirical derivation of types of aphasia. Eight of the variables are sufficiently significant to discriminate the aphasic group from the normal group.
This paper reviews research and theoretical articles investigating psycholinguistic aspects of aphasia. The major parts of the review include the concept of regression in aphasic language both on an ontogenetic and a microgenetic level, and studies of specific parameters, such as abstractness; it discusses the approach of mathematical linguistics and the types of aphasia described on the basis of linguistic evidence.
Application of the word-frequency concept to aphasia
- D Howes
Linguistic evaluation of free speech samples obtained from aphasic speakers. Manual of instructions for transcription and coding
- O Spreen
- R S Wachal
Zipf's Law and the speech of aphasic patients
- O Spreen
- R S Wachal
Edition of text from a dysphasic patient
- A S C Ross
- P R F Clarke
- N L Haddock
Grammatical analysis of aphasic language. Manual of instructions for classification and coding
- R S Wachal
- O Spreen
A linear regression and goodness-of-fit program for the IBM 360/44. Mimeo
- P Arnold
- J Inkster
- J King
- P Konkin
Hesitation, information, and levels of speech production
- F Goldman-Eisler
Language and Language Disturbances
- K Goldstein