Measuring word retrieval in narrative discourse: core lexicon in aphasia.
Hana Kim, Stephen Kintz, Kristen Zelnosky and 1 others
PMID 30426603WHAT IT FOUND
Verb words from age-matched picture-book lists tracked aphasia severity, while noun, adjective and adverb lists did not.
With only 11 people with aphasia, this is an early measure check, not proof verb counts diagnose severity.
Key findings
01For both picture-book tasks, core verb agreement was higher when WAB-R AQ scores were higher.
02Core noun, adjective and adverb agreement did not show the same relation to WAB-R AQ scores.
03Fluent aphasia participants produced more core verbs than non-fluent aphasia participants on both picture-book tasks.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 11 people with aphasia were analysed. The post-hoc fluent and non-fluent analyses included 5 and 6 participants and a restricted range of severity. Nearly half of the aphasia participants presented with Broca's aphasia, which may have shaped the verb result. The core lists used an arbitrary cut-off of the 25 most frequent lemmas. The study did not test the lists against other linguistic measures or standardized tools in this analysis. The measure only captures lexical retrieval, not syntax, speech rate or fluency.
Declared interests
The authors reported no conflicts of interest and said they alone were responsible for the content and writing of the paper.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use the core verb list as a validated diagnostic tool. The verb result came from 11 people with aphasia, and the noun, adjective and adverb lists did not show the same relation to WAB-R AQ scores.