Funding

1. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorder (National Institutes of Health)
   
2. University of Texas at Dallas, Callier Center for Communication Disorders

Participants

We are currently seeking participants who have had a stroke and have aphasia, a speech and language difficulty that often results from a stroke.

Survey participants are paid for their participation.

Research Team

• Principal Investigator: Gloria Olness, Ph.D., CCC-SP, UTD Callier Center for Communication Disorders
  
• Research Speech-Language Pathologist: Beverly Moshay, CCC-SP, UTD Callier Center for Communication Disorders
  
• Consultants:

  a) Patricia Cukor-Avila, Ph.D., University of North Texas

  b) Joan C. Payne, Ph.D., Howard University

  c) Pamela Rollins, Ph.D., University of Texas at Dallas

• Transcriptionist: Gretchen Melpolder, University of Texas at Dallas

Description of the study

Measures of discourse production are important for clinical assessment of functional communication of individuals with aphasia from diverse ethnic groups. Despite a higher risk for stroke and aphasia among African Americans as compared to Caucasians, little information is available on ethnically sensitive clinical assessment of discourse for African Americans, nor is there an assessment tool that can systematically examine discourse production for aphasia at a variety of severity levels. This study contributes to a long-range plan to develop a clinically viable and systematic means of assessing discourse production among individuals with aphasia at a variety of severity levels from ethnically diverse backgrounds, as well as a database of narratives produced by African American and Caucasian adults with aphasia. The short-range goal of this project is to collect pilot data on a broad range of narrative discourse tasks from African Americans and Caucasians with and without aphasia.

The three specific aims of the study are to pilot a range of tasks and analyses for their viability in assessing:

a) narrative production for a variety of aphasia severity levels;

b) ethnic features in narratives of African Americans and Caucasians; and

c) robustness or vulnerability of ethnic features in narratives of African Americans who have aphasia.

Six groups will participate: African Americans and Caucasians with mild aphasia, African Americans and Caucasians with moderate to moderately severe aphasia, and neurologically normal African Americans and Caucasians. Subjects will be characterized with a detailed ethnographic questionnaire, and will be presented with a range of narrative tasks (single-picture elicitations, picture-sequence elicitations, narrative retells, story completion, personal narratives, and narrative synopses). Analyses will include a multi-factor ranking of overall quality, characterizations of narrative structure and content, and examination of morpho-syntactic contributions to the narrative structure as they vary across ethnic and clinical group boundaries. Results could hold important implications for building clinical measures based on a broader and deeper understanding of the interactions between functional discourse, ethnicity, and aphasia.