Proceedings of the 7th World Conference on Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Qualitative and Quantitative Cohesion Analysis in the Discourse of Polish Language Speakers Diagnosed with Mixed Aphasia: Discourse Examination
Paulina Wójcik-Topór, Urszula Malina, Jędrzej Michalik
ABSTRACT:
Aphasia, as a language impairment caused by brain injury, is a significant issue in our society due to its negative impact on patient’s quality of life. This paper presents analysis of collected data on cohesion in the utterances of patients diagnosed with mixed aphasia and comparing this data with a control group. The discourse samples have been gathered using a purposely developed data collection instruments, which consists of 7 discourse tasks related to patients’ free speech together with narrative, procedural and descriptive language skills. The discourse transcripts have been coded for the presence of established in advance cohesion ties in the following categories: grammatical cohesion (reference, substitution and ellipsis), lexical cohesion (reiteration and collocation) and conjunction. The main purpose of presented in this paper qualitative and quantitative cohesion analysis is to answer to the following research questions: ‘which grammatical and lexical discourse cohesion devices and patterns are used by the aphasic study participants of the study?’; ‘how do they compare with the grammatical and lexical discourse cohesion devices used by brain-healthy controls?’; ‘how are they affected by aphasia type, severity and discourse genre?’. Presented study is a part of the multilevel investigation of discourse of Polish speakers suffering from aphasia, which includes cohesion test based on gathered discourse samples.
keywords: AphasiaBank, cohesive ties, discourse samples, narration analysis, SALT software