Development of a measure of function word use in narrative discourse: core lexicon analysis in aphasia.
Hana Kim, Stephen Kintz, Heather Harris Wright
PMID 32909656WHAT IT FOUND
A new checklist of 25 common function words showed that people with aphasia used fewer of them than healthy adults.
The measure also separated fluent from non-fluent aphasia, but the study was exploratory with a very small aphasia group.
Key findings
01Persons with aphasia produced significantly fewer core function words than age- and education-matched healthy controls on two narrative tasks.
02Participants with fluent aphasia produced more core function words than participants with non-fluent aphasia.
03The percentage of core function words produced correlated significantly with aphasia severity scores.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 11 persons with aphasia, which is too small to establish clinical utility. The fluency classification used to group participants relies partly on function word use, creating a circular comparison. The non-fluent group had more severe aphasia than the fluent group, which may explain the difference in word use rather than fluency type itself. The measure counts the presence of words but does not check if they were used correctly grammatically. The selection of 25 words was arbitrary and may not capture the most clinically relevant function words.
Declared interests
The authors report no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not adopt this checklist as a standard clinical assessment tool. The study was exploratory with only 11 participants with aphasia, and the grouping of fluent versus non-fluent aphasia relied on the same type of language data being measured.