Abstract
Measuring the coherence of healthy and aphasic discourse production in Chinese using Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)
Highlights
Discourse coherence refers to the semantic connectedness of propositions in a connected speech
Fifteen Cantonese-speaking adults with anomic aphasia and their controls matched in age, education, and gender participated
Each sample was segmented into elementary discourse units (EDU) and annotated according to Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)
Summary
Discourse coherence refers to the semantic connectedness of propositions in a connected speech. Narrative elicitation tasks, and sample quantifications as well as small sample sizes in most studies resulted in a substantial disparity in findings regarding the micro-linguistic and macro-linguistic aspects of aphasic discourse (Armstrong, 2000). While some reports claimed macro-linguistic skills in aphasia to be well-preserved despite lexical, grammatical, and phonological impairments, other studies demonstrated reduced discourse coherence due to omission of important content and higher proportion of irrelevant propositions. In this study we analyzed the discourse structure in aphasic connected speech using Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST; Mann & Thompson, 1988). The present study investigated how discourse coherence in healthy speakers differed from speakers with anomic aphasia.
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