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Aphasia blog talk: How does stroke and aphasia affect a person’s social relationships?
Background: Stroke and aphasia can negatively affect a person’s ability to maintain healthy social relationships, both within the family and also with friends and the wider network. To date, this has been explored predominantly through qualitative interviews and questionnaires. Blogs written by people with aphasia constitute a novel source of data, comprised of people’s own voices on issues that are of concern to them.
Aims: To explore the impact of stroke and aphasia on a person’s relationships with family, friends and the wider network through analysing blogs written by people with aphasia.
Methods & Procedures: Blog search engines were used to identify blogs sustained by a sole author who had aphasia following a stroke, and which reflected on their social network. The data were analysed qualitatively using framework analysis.
Outcomes & Results: The systematic search resulted in 10 relevant blogs. Participants were aged between 26 and 69 years old, lived in the community, were at least 1 year post stroke and included six women and four men. Aphasia was a consistent thread running through the blogs affecting conversations with all parts of a person’s network and impacting on participants’ sense of self. They found it more difficult to take part in family activities and described higher degrees of dependence and changed family dynamics. Contact with friends was reduced, partly due to communication and physical difficulties. While some participants became motivated to become members of groups post stroke, contact with the wider network sometimes diminished, in part because of loss of work and community activities. An additional factor impacting on social relationships was other people’s positive or negative reaction towards the person with aphasia. Finally, the blogs reflected on the importance of support they had received, both from close family and also from the wider community.
Conclusions: This study found that social relationships played a crucial role in people’s lives following a stroke and aphasia. Nonetheless, family relationships, friendships and social exchanges within the wider social network were all substantially affected. Exploring this area through online narratives offered a rich and highly authentic source of data. The findings suggest that clinicians should incorporate social approaches in rehabilitation and consider ways to foster the maintenance of social networks. The use of social media by people with aphasia should be further explored, both as a therapeutic outlet and also as a way for people with aphasia to feel connected to a wider community
CroDA: Hrvatski diskursni korpus govornika s afazijom
The paper describes data collection and transcription to develop the Croatian discourse corpus of speakers with aphasia (CroDA), developed within the framework of the project Adult Language Processing (HRZZ 2421-UIP-11-2013) and available from 2017 as part of the AphasiaBank database of multimedia interactions for studying communication among speakers with aphasia. In accordance with the AphasiaBank Protocol, the following discourse tasks were sampled: personal narrative, picture description, story narrative and procedura discourse. Recorded speech was transcribed according to the Codes for Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT). CroDA, as the first discourse corpus of speakers with aphasia in Croatian, may provide new insights into specific linguistic features of discourse produced by speakers with aphasia and serve as a useful resource for quantitative and qualitative analysis.Rad opisuje postupak prikupljanja podataka i transkripciju upotrijebljenu u razvoju Hrvatskog diskursnog korpusa govornika s afazijom razvijenog u sklopu projekta Adult Language Processing (HRZZ-2421-UIP-11-2013) i dostupnog od 2017. kao dio AphasiaBank - baze multimedijalne interakcije za proučavanje komunikacije među govornicima s afazijom. U skladu s protokolom AphasiaBanka uzorkovani su diskursi na temelju četiriju zadataka: pripovijedanja osobne priče, opisa slike, prepričavanja priče i proceduralnog diskursa. Snimljeni govorni uzorci transkribirani su u skladu s Codes for Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT). CroDA, kao prvi diskursni korpus govornika s afazijom u hrvatskom može dati nove uvide u specifična jezična obilježja diskursne proizvodnje govornika s afazijom i poslužiti kao korisni izvor za kvantitativne i kvalitativne analize
Using network science in the language sciences and clinic
A number of variables—word frequency, word length—have long been known to influence language processing. We briefly review the effects in speech perception and production of two more recently examined variables: phonotactic probability and neighborhood density. We then describe a new approach to study language, network science, which is an interdisciplinary field drawing from mathematics, computer science, physics, and other disciplines. In this approach, nodes represent individual entities in a system (i.e., phonological word-forms in the lexicon), links between nodes represent relationships between nodes (i.e., phonological neighbors), and various measures enable researchers to assess the micro-level (i.e., the individual word), the macro-level (i.e., characteristics about the whole system), and the meso-level (i.e., how an individual fits into smaller sub-groups in the larger system). Although research on individual lexical characteristics such as word-frequency has increased our understanding of language processing, these measures only assess the “micro-level.” Using network science, researchers can examine words at various levels in the system, and how each word relates to the many other words stored in the lexicon. Several new findings using the network science approach are summarized to illustrate how this approach can be used to advance basic research as well as clinical practice
Blistering barnacles! What language do multilinguals swear in?!
The present contribution focuses on the effects of language dominance / attrition, context of
acquisition, age of onset of learning, frequency of general use of a language and
sociodemographic variables on self-reported language choice for swearing. The analysis is
based on a database to which 1039 multilinguals contributed through a web based
questionnaire. Results suggest that, according to the self-reports, swearing happens most
frequently in the multilinguals’ dominant language. Mixed instruction, an early start in the
learning process, and frequent use of a language all contribute to the choice of that language
for swearing. Sociodemographic variables were not found to have any effect. Frequency of
language choice for swearing was found to be positively correlated with perceived emotional
force of swearwords in that language. Quantitative results based on answers to close-ended
questions corresponded to participants’ responses to open-ended questions
The Resilience of the Phonological Network May Have Implications for Developmental and Acquired Disorders
A central tenet of network science states that the structure of the network influences processing. In this study of a phonological network of English words we asked: how does damage alter the network structure (Study 1)? How does the damaged structure influence lexical processing (Study 2)? How does the structure of the intact network “protect” processing with a less efficient algorithm (Study 3)? In Study 1, connections in the network were randomly removed to increasingly damage the network. Various measures showed the network remained well-connected (i.e., it is resilient to damage) until ~90% of the connections were removed. In Study 2, computer simulations examined the retrieval of a set of words. The performance of the model was positively correlated with naming accuracy by people with aphasia (PWA) on the Philadelphia Naming Test (PNT) across four types of aphasia. In Study 3, we demonstrated another way to model developmental or acquired disorders by manipulating how efficiently activation spread through the network. We found that the structure of the network “protects” word retrieval despite decreases in processing efficiency; words that are relatively easy to retrieve with efficient transmission of priming remain relatively easy to retrieve with less efficient transmission of priming. Cognitive network science and computer simulations may provide insight to a wide range of speech, language, hearing, and cognitive disorders
Exploring Interdisciplinarity: The Significance of Metaphoric and Metonymic Exchange
Drawing upon five years of experience with an interdisciplinary initiative, colleagues in biology, literary studies, and physics offer a framework by which to understand the nature and value of interdisciplinary work. Effective interdisciplinary exchange depends on a dynamic and mutual interplay that challenges normally unexamined disciplinary assumptions. Effective interdisciplinary exchange can not only reinvigorate the disciplines but also engage them more effectively in a common intellectual enterprise, one that in turn is able to engage more effectively with a wide range of human concerns beyond the academy
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