Personal Narratives in Aphasia: Understanding Narrative Competence

Abstract

Narrative competence was exhibited in the personal narratives of individuals with mild to moderate aphasia. In addition to pinpointing essential elements of narrative competence, the use of personal narratives was deemed beneficial for both the clinician, by providing a better understanding of the individual with aphasia, and the individual with aphasia, by providing opportunities for self-disclosure.

Evaluating Personal Stroke Narratives from Bilingual Greek-English Immigrants with Aphasia

“…For the majority of bPWA (4/6), longer stroke stories were produced in the native language (Greek compared to English), but the opposite was also observed for one individual. This finding of individual differences in the amount of language produced is in line with what is reported on the wide range in length of stroke narratives produced by monolingual PWA [24]. …”

“…dominated the narrative. It is well established from the monolingual aphasia literature that most PWA have difficulties with reference when producing narratives [22, 24]. The findings regarding reference in this study suggest, first, that referential language can be an area of difficulty for bPWA, particularly in their less dominant or less proficient language and, second, if a breakdown in reference is moderate (or worse) in one language, then in all likelihood difficulties with reference will be present in the other language(s) as well.…”

“…Data were analysed descriptively, without any statistical analyses, strictly following the published procedure outlined by Ulatowska et al [24]. …”

“…Most of the stroke stories collected by this team of researchers were produced by middle-aged, English-speaking Caucasian and African-American adults with mild-moderate aphasia. The research findings have covered three broad themes: (i) overall narrative competence [22, 24], (ii) coherence of information [14, 22] and (iii) use of linguistic/non-linguistic evaluative devices to assign prominence [23, 25] to the stroke narrative. In general, the findings revealed that individuals with mild to moderate aphasia demonstrate relatively intact narrative competence in relation to coherence, clarity and temporal-causal structure despite difficulties with reference [1, 24, 25].…”

“…The research findings have covered three broad themes: (i) overall narrative competence [22, 24], (ii) coherence of information [14, 22] and (iii) use of linguistic/non-linguistic evaluative devices to assign prominence [23, 25] to the stroke narrative. In general, the findings revealed that individuals with mild to moderate aphasia demonstrate relatively intact narrative competence in relation to coherence, clarity and temporal-causal structure despite difficulties with reference [1, 24, 25]. Similarly, with regard to use of narrative evaluative devices PWA tend to show somewhat preserved ability to assign prominence to information and produce “tellable” narratives, especially when aphasia is not severe [23, 25, 26].…”