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Using spontaneous speech samples to measure change in aphasia
Author(s) -
EDWARDS SUSAN
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
international journal of language and communication disorders
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.101
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1460-6984
pISSN - 1368-2822
DOI - 10.1111/j.1460-6984.1995.tb01712.x
Subject(s) - aphasia , psychology , task (project management) , connected speech , aphasiology , language disorder , focus (optics) , cognitive psychology , linguistics , computer science , natural language processing , speech recognition , cognition , neuroscience , philosophy , physics , management , optics , economics
Assessment of aphasia is an essential component of aphasia therapy. Results from assessment procedures form the baseline by which language change may be measured and provide the rationale for therapy. Assessment results also reveal the nature of aphasia exhibited by the individual client. It is therefore of paramount importance that assessment procedures are robust, reliable and revealing. Assessments should give some way of quantifying the speech produced as well as describing task performance. Published aphasia assessments frequently used in clinical practice focus on language tasks rather than spontaneous language and therefore have little to offer by way of quantifying connected speech. In this paper the case is made for including the analysis of spontaneous speech as part of aphasia assessment. A procedure which can capture grammatical features of connected speech at phrasal, clausal and supra‐sentential level and therefore be applied to a range of aphasic and normal speech will be described. Illustrative results from normal and aphasic speakers will be given and the clinical and theoretical implications of these results will be discussed.