Psycholinguistic Analysis of Aphasic Language: Theoretical Formulations and Procedures

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.