Drawing as a window to event conceptualisation: Evidence from two people with aphasia

Abstract

Background: There is growing interest in how problems with “thinking for speaking” (Slobin, 1996) interact with language impairment in aphasia (Marshall, 2009). Evidence to date has come from language production tasks, or from non-linguistic input-focused tasks that bear little relation to the processes involved in event communication. The current study describes a novel approach using a non-linguistic communication task, the Event Drawing Task, to investigate event conceptualisation in two people with aphasia, only one of whom is hypothesised to have problems at this level. Aims: The study aims to identify similarities and differences between the event drawing performance of the two aphasic participants and a group of 12 non-brain-damaged controls. Intact event conceptualisation (participant “Bob”) would predict a similar performance to controls, while event conceptualisation problems (participant “Jack”) would predict differences from control performance. Methods & Procedures: “Bob” and “Jack” both had severe nonfluent aphasia resulting from a single stroke. A number of background language and event-processing assessments were carried out to gain a profile of their abilities. The Event Drawing Task required participants to communicate 32 short video clips of events using only drawing. Five theoretically motivated analyses were performed on the data from the Event Drawing Task, which targeted specific aspects of event conceptualisation. Patterns within control performance were identified, which formed the basis for detailed comparison with the performance of the two people with aphasia. Outcomes & Results: As predicted, Bob's performance on the Event Drawing Task mirrored that of controls in all analyses, while Jack's performance differed widely from the controls' on a number of parameters. Importantly, characteristics of Jack's event drawing performance provide further evidence for an event conceptualisation impairment. Conclusions: The findings confirm that event conceptualisation problems may be an additional source of deficit in aphasia. Furthermore, they suggest that these problems are likely to affect non-linguistic, as well as linguistic, forms of communication. This has both theoretical and clinical implications. It suggests that we need to consider “thinking for communication” more generally, in both the assessment and remediation of severe aphasia.