Action 2: Narratives

Coordinator

This action was coordinated by Prof. S. Varlokosta from the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Philology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

Aims

The aims were to identify impairments at microlinguistic (sentence) and macrolinguistic (discourse) levels, as well as the interrelations between sentence-level and discourse level phenomena, in order to investigate the effects of these impairments to aphasic people’s communicative competence in their everyday lives.

Method

Materials: A battery of four narrative tasks was designed (Kakavoulia et al. 2014) for the purposes of the research. The battery included the following tasks: a) unaided production of a personal narrative (“stroke story”), b) a novel story production based on a 6-picture series (“the party”), c) story retelling (after listening) of an original story with the support of a 5-picture series (“the ring”), d) a retelling (after listening) of a familiar Aesop’s fable (“hare and tortoise”).

Participants: 20 PWA aged between 42-85 years of age took part in this action as well as 20 neurologically healthy controls aged between 42-75 years who served as the control group. All participants in the latter group had undergone a heart attack allowing them to produce a personal narrative about an illness similar to the group with aphasia.

Analysis

The spontaneous speech samples were transcribed and annotated with the ELAN transcription and annotation tool. A structured, multi-tiered detailed annotation scheme was designed for the purposes of the research to include all the parameters of discourse under investigation including speech events (e.g. vowel and consonant lengthening, pauses, filled gaps, self-corrections etc), micro-linguistic features (words, POS, grammatical, semantic and phonological errors, clause types etc) as well as macro-linguistic features (narrative structure elements, main events, evaluation devices).

The result of this process was the compilation of the Greek Corpus of Aphasic Discourse (GREECAD) (Varlokosta et al. 2016). The development of the GREECAD had to meet the following requirements: a) to include a rather homogeneous sample of Greek as spoken by individuals with mild non-fluent aphasia; b) to document speech samples with rich metadata, which include demographic information, information on the patients’ medical record, as well as their speech and language therapy and neuropsychological evaluation; c) to provide annotated speech samples which encode properties of speech as well as linguistic information at the micro-linguistic (words, POS, grammatical, semantic, and phonological errors, clause types, etc.) and discourse level (narrative structure units, main events, evaluation devices, etc.).