Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Advanced Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Local and Global Coherence Examination According to the Impaired Discourse of Polish Language Speakers Diagnosed with Mixed Aphasia
Paulina Wójcik-Topór, Urszula Malina, Jędrzej Michalik
ABSTRACT:
Aphasia, a speech disorder affecting people who were previously able to speak, resulting from damage to the central nervous system, causes in the exclusion of the patient from communication and thus social life. It is a condition that can affect a person of any age – extremely distressing and, regardless of the extent of the brain damage, difficult for a previously healthy individuals. Much is said about the linguistic errors that aphatics make within words or sentences, such as twisting words, creating neologisms, conjugating incorrectly, and forming sentences with incorrect formation. There seems to be less analysis of the coherence of whole statements created by patients – the logic of their arguments and references to the main topic. The presentation will present and discuss the results of a recent study on the local and global speech coherence of Polish speakers with a diagnosis of mixed aphasia compared to data collected from healthy individuals. Participants’ discourse was collected using the AphasiaBank project’s data collection protocol, transcribed, coded and then analysed using SALT software. For the benefit of the study, van Leer and Turkstra’s (1999) local and global coherence rating scales were translated, adapted to Polish conditions, and tested, and then used to assess levels of coherence in discourse samples. The presentation will show what level of local and global coherence was provided by people with mixed aphasia compared to the coherence of discourse of healthy people, how the level of coherence changes depending on the type of aphasia (prevalence of axial symptoms), its severity and the genre of discourse. The analysed data refers to coherence and is part of a multi-level discourse study of Polish speakers diagnosed with mixed aphasia, including both local and global coherence and cohesion research based on collected discourse samples.
keywords: coherence, discourse analysis, mixed aphasia, Polish speakers