Discourse: Assessment and Therapy

Abstract

Discourse is essential for interaction and for the expression of ideas, feelings and opinions. Telling personal stories, such as talking about your day or recounting what happened in the playground, is essential for communication and establishing relationships. However, due to their language impairments, people with aphasia (PWA) and children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often have problems with everyday discourse which impact on their lives more widely. While improvement in language skills is supported by speech-language pathology (therapy), it tends to focus on smaller linguistic components, such as single words and sentences. This chapter outlines how speakers construct discourse in everyday situations and focuses on the meanings that people use discourse to convey, as well as the lexical and grammatical resources they use to convey these meanings. Current methods for discourse analysis will be outlined and key developments in narrative discourse production therapy will be reviewed.

Leveraging big data to understand the interaction of task and language during monologic spoken discourse in speakers with and without aphasia

“…Finally, this analysis was restricted to only a single level of discourse (microstructure, or the language used in the discourse), and did not evaluate further levels, such as macrostructure / functional information [Frederiksen et al, 1990,Sherratt, 2007. We intend to conduct future work linking together micro-and macrostructural levels, as has been suggested by others [Sherratt, 2007, Dipper & Pritchard, 2017, Marini et al, 2011. Figure S1: Means ± one standard error for demographic and some linguistic variables by task and aphasia type.…”

“…In linguistics, the term discourse is typically defined as a language unit longer than a single sentence, but in clinical contexts, is more narrowly defined as language beyond a single simple clause, which is used for a specific purpose or function [Dipper & Pritchard, 2017].…”

“…For example, if the goal is to comprehensively understand a person's morphosyntactic system or to identify changes in morphosyntax as a result of intervention, it may be best to sample language using a narrative elicitation method rather than a procedural elicitation method [Stark, 2019, Ulatowska et al, 1981, as narratives typically associate with denser and more syntactically complex language. Pritchard and Dipper offer another hypothetical situation to the same effect: that if a client has difficulty with cohesion (a macrostructural variable), the clinician should select a discourse elicitation method that is likely to use cohesion, such as a narrative discourse with multiple characters, in order to test this hypothesis [Dipper & Pritchard, 2017]. While understanding task-specific interactions with language is ideal, doing so does not necessarily argue against collection of multiple samples (indeed, in the case of both examples, it would argue for the collection of multiple narrative samples).…”

Narrative Skills of Monolingual and Bilingual Pre-School and Primary School Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD): A Systematic Review

“…However, due to their language impairments, children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often have problems with everyday discourse which impact on their lives more widely. Discourse and narrative are given strong emphasis within early years and school curricula (Dipper & Pritchard, 2017). Much of what we know about the discourse of children and adults with language impairment and the majority of the published clinical tools come from picture descriptions and fictional narrative discourse (Linnik et al, 2016).…”

Content Word Production during Discourse in Aphasia: Deficits in Word Quantity, Not Lexical–Semantic Complexity

“…Discourse production provides a rich data source to assess linguistic content/structure and language use in a more naturalistic context (Dipper & Pritchard, 2017). Different elicitation stimuli tend to elicit different discourse genres, and studies vary in the employed elicitation stimuli.…”