Narrative assessment in patients with communicative disorders

Several studies have shown that traditional standardised aphasia tests may not be sensitive enough to adequately assess linguistic deficits and recovery patterns in persons with aphasia. As a result, both functional and structural methods for the analysis of connected language samples from people with aphasia have been devised. This article focuses on the description of a multi-level procedure for structural and functional analysis of connected language elicited by speakers with brain damage on single picture and cartoon story description tasks. The analysis focuses on four main aspects of linguistic processing: productivity, lexical and grammatical processing, narrative organization, and informativeness. The discussion will outline data from studies where this method of analysis has been applied to a number of neurogenic populations (e.g., persons with Right Hemisphere Damage, or Traumatic Brain Injury).