Communicative activities of dysphasic adults: a survey

Abstract

This study investigated the communicative activities of 42 dysphasic stroke patients who were living at home. Two aspects of natural communication were surveyed: the conversational communication which occurs with the social contacts of the subject, and the communicative activities of daily living. The two aims of the study were to investigate the relevance of a selection of communicative activities of daily living, and to investigate possible grading of activities so that a representative sample of everyday activities may be used in the assessment and treatment of dysphasia.Individuals showed wide variation in their communicative needs. These needs may not be met in the traditional linguistic speech therapy regimen. It is suggested that the use of an interview schedule like that used in this survey may serve as a starting point in the treatment of functional communication skills in dysphasic adults. Guttman scale analysis showed that communicative activities of daily living do not form a unidimensional scale. A representative sampling of activities, however, may be possible using the hierarchies of familiarity and difficulty obtained.

Neuropsychological predictors in stroke rehabilitation

“…With regard to aphasia, Holland (1980) has designed a test of functional communication. The search for a method of describing natural communication has been impeded so far because of the wide variation of communicative needs showed by aphasics in real-life situations (Smith, 1985). The objective of this avenue of research is to construct neuropsychological tests with optimal relevance to functional status.…”

A comparison of two approaches in the treatment of perceptual problems after stroke

“…Various studies have investigated this at different times post onset, for example, Denes et al (1982) followed patients up at six months, Andrews et al (1982) at one year, Kinsella and Ford (1980;1985) at three months and 18 months, at two years, Kotila et al (1986) at four years and Bemspang et al (1987) at four to six years post onset of stroke. Denes et al (1982), as described in section 1.4, completed a study on stroke patients on admission and at six months after onset.…”

“…They found that all aspects of functional ability were worse in those patients who had drawn abnormal pictures and concluded that cortical dysfunction such as cognitive or perceptual disorders were a major barrier to recovery. Kinsella and Ford (1980;1985), as previously mentioned in section 1.4, followed up 31 stroke patients, aged less than 75 years. They assessed the patients on a cognitive battery of tests, unilateral spatial neglect, motor function and ADL.…”

“…In two studies by Kinsella and Ford (1980;1985), 31 patients, aged less than 75 years were followed up to study the recovery pattern of unilateral neglect. They found no change in the severity of neglect between assessments at four weeks and three months after stroke but there was some improvement in the frequency of rightlleft disorientation.…”

“…However, language difficulties were still found to be significant in memory tests, even when patients did have longer intervals before giving their answers. Smith (1985) studied 42 dysphasic stroke patients with a mean age of65.7 years and mean of 24 months post stroke, who were living at home. She found that the presence of dysphasia related to everyday communicative activities.…”