Introducing the NEURAL Research Lab Data Set for Studies of Discourse and Gesture in Aphasia and Cognitively Healthy Aging Adults.
Brielle C Stark, Kent Meinert, Katelyn Urena and 3 others
PMID 41037581WHAT IT FOUND
People with mild or latent aphasia spoke less fluently than cognitively healthy adults on a story retell.
Gesture rates did not differ by group, but more gestures appeared when aphasia severity was greater.
Key findings
01During the Cinderella story retell, adults with aphasia produced fewer words per minute and more phonological fragments, phrase repetitions, word revisions, phrase revisions, and filled pauses than cognitively healthy adults.
02Fluency measures did not differ significantly between test and retest across all participants or within either group.
03Gesture rate did not differ significantly between groups, but in the aphasia subsample lower Western Aphasia Battery-Revised scores were associated with more gestures.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
This is a data set description with example analyses, not a test of treatment. The aphasia sample was mostly mild or latent, so results may not apply to severe aphasia. The cognitively healthy adult sample was not racially or ethnically representative of the United States. Data collection for the cognitively healthy group was ongoing, with 54 of a target 75 participants tested. The example analyses used smaller subsamples than the full data set, with 35 and 22 participants for fluency and 18 and 26 participants for gesture. Some data were missing or excluded, including technical issues that left approximately 20 participants missing TALSA data and two participants excluded for poor audio. Not all discourse tasks were collected at both test and retest. Gesture coding reliability was checked in only 6 transcripts. The aphasia group was significantly younger than the healthy group in the example analyses.
Declared interests
This research was supported by National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Grant R01DC008524 awarded to Brian MacWhinney and Brielle C. Stark. Author Urena received a Supplement to Promote Diversity to recruit a diverse sample for the to-be-collected CHA data.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that gesture rate can identify aphasia. The gesture rate did not differ significantly between groups, and the gesture analysis used 18 participants with aphasia and 26 cognitively healthy adults.
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