Comparison of language impairment, functional communication, and discourse measures in African-American aphasic and normal adults

Abstract

We compared performance on language impairment, functional communication, and discourse measures between 33 African-American aphasic patients and 30 African-American normal subjects. The aphasic group performed significantly lower than the normal group on the Western Aphasia Battery Aphasia and Cortical Quotients, Token Test, and ASHA Functional Assessment of Communication Skills for Adults. Moreover, the aphasic group performed significantly lower than the normal group in their quality of language on a discourse task that required telling a frightening experience. Significant relationships between performance on the measures were confined to those that index language impairment. Use of a normal ethnic cohort for comparison with African-American aphasic performance may control for potential ethnic bias in the measures. In addition, use of a discourse task permits observation of grammatical and stylistic features in African-American English that may not be captured or are ignored by traditional language impairment and functional communication measures.