The Main Concept Analysis: Validation and sensitivity in differentiating discourse produced by unimpaired English speakers from individuals with aphasia and dementia of Alzheimer type

Abstract

The MCA was appropriate to be used among native speakers of English. The results also provided further empirical evidence of discourse deficits in aphasia and dementia. Practitioners can use the MCA to evaluate discourse production systemically and objectively.

Moving Toward Non-transcription based Discourse Analysis in Stable and Progressive Aphasia

“…32 Additionally, a formula for converting codes into scores has been developed by Kong, 56 and modified by Richardson and Dalton. 6 MCA is sensitive to differences between clinical and control populations, 32,[56][57][58][59][60][61] and correlates with listeners' perceptions. 62 Additionally, while different measures have been used (e.g., tau, absolute agreement), all investigations reporting reliability show adequate inter-and intra-rater reliability.…”

Main Concept Analysis for Acquired Deficits of Spoken Narratives: Preliminary Data on Inter-rater Agreement and Potential Application to the Korean-Speaking Population

“…The index is then computed by dividing the AC by the total duration. With reference to the example of sequential pictures in Figure 1, Appendix A shows the five target main concepts of Set 1 in the English MCA, along with the acceptable alternative lexical items based on normative data reported in [7]. There are six, nine, and six target main concepts in MCA picture sets 2 to 4, respectively.…”

“…There are six, nine, and six target main concepts in MCA picture sets 2 to 4, respectively. The MCA has been reported to distinguish PWAs from unimpaired speakers across various language ad-aptations, such as English [7], Cantonese Chinese [5], as well as Mandarin Chinese for Taiwan [10]. It has also been translated into Irish-English [11] and Putonghua for Mainland China [8].…”

“…According to Kong [1], "the process of translating spoken data to an orthographic medium involves the making of multiple decisions along the way"… and … "the degree of how many decisions are made by an examiner in preparing and processing a transcript and how reliable these decisions are will depend on factors such as the type of the discourse tasks, experience of preparing transcription and conducting text-based discourse analyses on the part of the raters, and the nature of the actual analyses (p. 66)". Although the analytic procedures of the MCA were claimed to be straightforward and clinically-friendly [5,7,10], inter-rater agreement of transcript coding (and subsequent MCA scoring) seemed to be affected by factors such as examiners' familiarity of narrative analysis or, simply, the test itself.…”

“…According to Nicholas and Brookshire [3], a main concept should contain only one main verb and provide an outline of the gist depicted in a picture, or an outline of the essential steps in a procedure. Following this particular analytic approach, the Main Concept Analysis (MCA) [4] has recently been developed and published to allow a more comprehensive and multilevel coding system of spoken output by individuals with aphasia [5,6], dementia [7], and TBI [8] in everyday clinical settings. In particular, the modification included development of four sets of sequential black-and-white line drawings and proposal of new quantification measures.…”