Main concepts for two picture description tasks: an addition to Richardson and Dalton, 2016

Abstract

Background: Proposition analysis of the discourse of persons with aphasia has a long history, yielding important advancements in our understanding of communication impairments in this population. Recently, discourse measures have been considered primary outcome measures, and multiple calls have been made for improved psychometric properties of discourse measures. Aims:To advance the use of discourse analysis in persons with aphasia by providing Main Concept Analysis checklists and descriptive statistics for healthy control performance on the analysis for the Cat in the Tree and Refused Umbrella narrative tasks utilized in the AphasiaBank database protocol.Methods & Procedures: Ninety-two control transcripts, stratified into four age groups (20-39 years; 40-59; 60-79; 80+), were downloaded from the AphasiaBank database. Relevant concepts were identified, and those spoken by at least one-third of the control sample were considered to be a main concept. A multi-level coding system was used to determine the accuracy and completeness of the main concepts produced by control speakers.Outcomes & Results: Main concept checklists for two discourse tasks are provided. Descriptive statistics are reported and examined to assist readers with evaluation of the normative data.Conclusions: These checklists provide clinicians and researchers with a tool to reliably assess the discourse of persons with aphasia. They also help address the gap in available psychometric data with which to compare persons with aphasia to healthy controls.

Moving Toward Non-transcription based Discourse Analysis in Stable and Progressive Aphasia

“…63 Recently, MCA checklists were developed using 92 control AphasiaBank speakers across the lifespan as a normative sample. 6,64 Scoring information regarding specific lexical usage of these controls, alternative syntactic structures, and disallowed lexical items or structures are provided in appendices to facilitate reliable scoring when used in conjunction with Appendix A of Nicholas and Brookshire. 32 Normative control data, normative PWA data, comparisons between controls and all PWAs, and comparisons of aphasia subtypes to controls have been reported using these checklists.…”

“…32 Normative control data, normative PWA data, comparisons between controls and all PWAs, and comparisons of aphasia subtypes to controls have been reported using these checklists. 6,57,64 Although MCA may not have been originally developed with non-transcription based analysis in mind, these tools may allow clinicians to reliably use it in this manner.…”

Using AphasiaBank for Discourse Assessment

“…Here, we will focus on new, clinically relevant discourse measurement tools and teaching resources that have been added to the AphasiaBank website (https://aphasia.talkbank.org/) over the ensuing years. The new measurement tools include Main Concept (MC) checklists, [3][4][5][6] Core Lexicon Checklists, 7,8 Correct Information Unit (CIU) computation, 9 the SCRIPT command for analyzing fixed scripts, 10,11 a larger EVAL reference database, and advanced tools to compute measures from the Quantitative Production Analysis (QPA) 12,13 and Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis (NNLA) [14][15][16] systems. The teaching resources include an online aphasia tutorial, a set of videos highlighting examples of behaviors typically seen in the connected speech of people with aphasia (PWAs), group treatment videos, classroom activities, tutorial screencasts, and conference poster archives.…”

“…(See article by Forbes et al 1 (also called "Cat in the Tree" in some literature; 10 MCs). 5,6 These checklists contain MCs mentioned by at least 33% of 92 control participants. Special symbols are used to mark a subset of the MCs in each checklist, indicating those that were spoken by 50 and 66% of the respondents.…”

“…Using a criterion of 60% or greater, Hameister and Nickels also created a list of MCs for the Cat Rescue task based on 50 control participants from the AphasiaBank database. 3 Though they used the same criterion as Richardson and Dalton, 5,6 their final list of MCs involved some additional consensus decisions made by three individual raters. Their results also provide the order in which each MC was mentioned and the exact percentage of control participants who mentioned each one.…”