Abstract
ABSTRACT The last decade has seen a marked increase in the number of studies investigating the discourse skills of people who have sustained closed head injury (CHI). The results of these studies have been mixed, which arises in part from the diversity of linguistic measures that have been employed. In addition, the clinical applicability of many of these measures is very limited. This study aims to establish linguistic measures for analysing narrative tasks with this client group which are clinically practical and which reflect listeners' perceptions of communicative performance. The study investigated the narrative re‐telling skills of 20 head‐injured subjects and 20 controls by use of an eight‐minute audiotaped story taken from a popular magazine. The control subjects were selected from other families in which someone had sustained a head injury and were matched for age, sex and education. In particular, the study focused on the relationship between qualitative ratings of the story transcripts and formal linguistic analyses. The ratings, on scales of organisation and context, were carried out by five members of Headway (the head injury support group) and five speech and language therapists. A subset of ‘best’ and ‘worst’ transcripts (which included overlap between CHI and control subjects) was used to isolate corresponding linguistic measures, which were then tested on all the transcripts. The results of the qualitative ratings and linguistic analyses will be presented.
Published Version
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