Macrolinguistic Analysis of Discourse Production in People with Aphasia, Individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Survivors of Traumatic Brain Injury
This study examined the macrolinguistic features of three genres (single picture description, sequential picture description, and story retell) of discourse samples collected from participants with acquired communication disorders (including two speakers with aphasia, two with mild cognitive impairment, and two with traumatic brain injury) and unimpaired controls (n=6). Comparisons were made to investigate group and genre differences. Standardized assessment scores of cognitive and linguistic evaluations were collected and correlated to features of macrolinguistic discourse analysis. Participants with acquired communication disorders performed best on the story retell discourse task compared to single picture description and sequential picture description. Significant measures for story retell task include lexical efficiency, time efficiency, and Main Concept score. No significant difference was found on performance between single-picture description task and sequential picture description for participants with acquired communication disorders. The Main Concept Analysis presented with the strongest correlation to macrolinguistic features of analysis. These preliminary findings suggest that main concept score is a predominant indicator of the overall informativeness and macrostructure of a speaker\u27s discourse
