Browsing by Author "Jormanainen, Sanna"

Aims. In the last few years there have been studies that use multi-level approaches in the analysis of narrative language in aphasia. In Finland there is no established method for assessing the narration of aphasic persons. The literature provides different models but there is not commonly approved system. The purpose of this study was to examine how aphasic persons perform in cartoon story description tasks and to apply a multi-level method for assessing their narrative speech. The aim is to find an appropriate model that discovers change in narrative speech. Method. Six aphasic persons participated in this research where they received transcranial magnetic stimulation or the placebo version of it and ILAT rehabilitation. The narrative speech of the participants was assessed by using to picture sequence tasks in four different times during the research: before the rehabilitation, during it, immediately after it and after 3 months. The analysis focused on 1) productivity, 2) lexical and grammatical processing and 3) informativeness. In addition their performance in narrative task was compared to performance scores in Western Aphasia Battery. The methods of analysis were adapted from methods used by Marini et al. (2011). Results and conclusions. In five out of the six persons who participated in this study there was some positive change in narration at least in one aspect of the analysis. Only one participant showed overall improvement. The participants who had fluent aphasia, had more clear changes in the results that the subjects who had non-fluent aphasia. The definition of the analyzing method was challenging but it is important to unravel these multi-level analyzing methods in Finland in future. The picture sequence task is a functional means to elicit narrative speech but instead of using sequences with small number of pictures sequences with more pictures should perhaps be used. It would also be important to collect normative data from Finnish speaking people using these multi-level methods. It would enable the comparison of aphasic person's narratives to the normative data.