engleski

Coherence in narrative discourse of people with aphasia and traumatic brain injury

Aphasia is an acquired language impairment typically caused by stroke. It occurs as a result of damage to specific brain regions, affecting one or more aspects of language. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is an injury caused by external physical force or violent movement of the head. TBI often results in cognitive, physical, behavioral, and communication difficulties. Discourse analysis, including the study of coherence, can provide information needed to understand the language manifestation of aphasia and TBI. Coherence refers to the ability to maintain thematic unity and semantic connectedness of discourse at the propositional level. The notion of impaired coherence in discourse of people with TBI is widely accepted. On the other hand, there has been considerable debate of whether such deficits exist in discourse of people with aphasia. This research studied the global coherence in narrative discourse of people with aphasia and TBI assuming that no difference would be found. The study included the analysis of transcripts of 6 subjects (3 with aphasia and 3 with TBI). All of them were patients in The Special Hospital for Medical Rehabilitation in Krapinske Toplice. Data analysis was performed in the CLAN, using a 4-point subjective scale to measure global coherence. Statistical data processing was done in IBM SPSS Statistic – version 26 (t-test). No statistically significant difference was found in the coherence of discourse of the participants with aphasia and participants with TBI (p> 0, 05). That confirmed the initial hypothesis. Therefore, it seems possible that different background difficulties are manifested in the same way. In other words, language pathology in people with aphasia and deficits of executive functions in people with TBI both result in impaired narrative organization and production. However, due to a small sample of participants and lack of control of the sociodemographic and clinical factors, caution in generalization of results is needed.

Aphasia ; Language ; Narration ; Traumatic Brain Injury

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