Aphasia is a language disorder resulting from damage to brain areas that control language expression and reception. Clinically, the narrative production of Persons with Aphasia (PWA) provides valuable information for diagnosis of aphasia. There are several types of assessment procedures for analysis of aphasic's narrative production. One of them is to use quantification systems, such as the Cantonese Linguistic Communication Measure (CLCM; Kong & Law, 2004) or the Main Concept Analysis (MCA; Kong, 2009), for objective quantification of aphasic's discourse. The purposes of this study are (1) to translate the MCA and CLCM to a Taiwanese Mandarin Main Concept Analysis (TM-MCA) and a Taiwanese Mandarin Linguistic Communication Measure (TM-LCM), respectively, and (2) to validate them based on normal speakers and PWA in Taiwan. In the pilot study, a total of sixteen participants, eight certified speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and eight normal speakers, were invited to establish the Taiwanese Mandarin main concepts related to the four sets of sequencial pictures created by Kong in 2009. The language samples from eight normal speakers were then used to determine the informative words (i-words) in the picture sets. In the main study, thirty-six normal speakers and ten PWA were recruited to perform the same picture description tasks. The elicited language samples were analyzed using both the TM-MCA and TM-LCM. The results suggested that both age and education affected the oral discourse performance. Significant differences on the measures in TM-MCA and indices in TM-LCM were noted between the normal and aphasic groups. It was also found that overall aphasia severity affected the picture description performances of PWA. Finally, significant correlations between some of the TM-MCA measures and TM-LCM indices were noted. In conclusion, both the TM-MCA and TM-LCM are culturally appropriate to the Taiwanese Mandarin population. They can be used to supplement standardized aphasia tests to help clinicians make more informative decisions not only on diagnosis but also on a treatment plan of aphasia.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-5639 |
| Date | 01 January 2014 |
| Creators | Yeh, Chun-chih |
| Publisher | University of Central Florida |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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