1,720,983 research outputs found
Narrative assessment in patients with communicative disorders
No full textSeveral 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)
The effect of lexical deficits on narrative disturbances in fluent aphasia
No full textAims: This study aims at investigating micro- and macrolinguistic skills in persons with fluent aphasia. The label “fluent aphasia” applies to different aphasic syndromes characterized by fluent speech with difficulties in lexical retrieval and/or grammatical processing. We hypothesized that their lexical and syntactic (i.e., microlinguistic) difficulties would affect also their narrative (i.e., macrolinguistic) skills.
Methods & Procedures: Growing evidence shows that traditional tests may not be sensitive enough to capture the patterns of the linguistic impairments observed in these persons. Therefore, we used a narrative task to elicit linguistic samples. Spontaneous speech was elicited through a picture description task. The narrative samples were analyzed with a multi-level approach that allows clinicians to quantify their productivity levels as well as their lexical, grammatical, and narrative skills. The spontaneous speech produced by a group of 20 persons with fluent aphasia was compared to that of a group of 20 healthy participants. All participants with aphasia were in the phase of neurological stability. The two groups were matched for age and level of formal education.
Outcomes & Results: Results showed that the lexical impairment observed in the group of participants with fluent aphasia were related to difficulties also in the grammatical construction of the utterances and in the macrolinguistic organization of their speech samples.
Conclusions: These findings support the possibility that in these patients microlinguistic difficulties might affect macrolinguistic processing. Furthermore, these results stress the importance of a multi-level approach to assess linguistic skills in patients with fluent aphasia, as it assesses both micro- and macrolinguistic dimensions in parallel. Therefore, it allows linguists, psychologists and clinicians to observe how the linguistic levels interact during natural language processing
Patterns of impairment of narrative language in mild traumatic brain injury
No full textMild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) represents a condition whose
cognitive and behavioral sequelae are often underestimated, even when it exerts a profound impact on the patients’ every-day life.The present study aimed to analyze the features of narrative
discourse impairment in a group of adults with mTBI. 10 mTBI non-aphasic speakers (GCS > 13) and 13 neurologically intact
participants were recruited for the experiment. Their cognitive,
linguistic and narrative skills were thoroughly assessed. The group
of mTBIs exhibited normal phonological, lexical and grammatical skills. However, their narratives were characterized by the presence of frequent interruptions of ongoing utterances, derailments
and extraneous utterances that at times made their discourse vague and ambiguous. They produced more errors of global coherence [F (1; 21) 1⁄4 24.242; p 1⁄4 .000; hp 2 1⁄4 0. 536] and fewer
Lexical Information Units [F (1; 21) 1⁄4 7.068; p 1⁄4 .015; hp 2 1⁄4 .252].
The errors of global coherence correlated negatively with non perseverative
errors on the WCST (r1⁄4.755; p < .012). The macrolinguistic problems made their narrative samples less informative
than those produced by the group of control participants. These disturbances may reflect a deficit at the interface between cognitive and linguistic processing rather than a specific linguistic disturbance. These findings suggest that also persons with mild
forms of TBI may experience linguistic disturbances that may hamper the quality of their every-day life
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
nor say it all
No full textTo fully embrace situations of radical uncertainty, we argue that the theory should abandon the requirements that narratives, in general, must lead to affective evaluation, and that they have to explain (and potentially simulate) all or even the bulk of the current decisional context. Evidence from studies of incidental learning show that narrative schemata can bias decisions while remaining fragmentary, insufficient for prediction, and devoid of utility values
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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