Narrative discourse in English speaking coloured persons with aphasia and normal controls in the Western Cape, South Africa

Abstract

This study aimed to characterise the discourse performance of English speaking Coloured persons with mild to moderate aphasia and match controls. It ascertained whether various narrative discourse tasks resulted in differences in discourse performance between the two groups in the amount of information and the quality of information provided as well as the number of evaluative devices used in various narrative tasks. Furthermore, adaptation features, dialectal features and ethnic discourse markers were identified. A narrative Discourse Test Battery devised by Ulatowska et al (1998) consisting of two composite pictures, a picture sequence story, a story retell and a personal experience task were administered to all subjects. In order to gain further insight into higher level cognitive processes the formulation of main ideas, providing the lessons for the stories and interpreting proverbs were used. All narrative samples were transcribed and the date treated in terms of the length of narratives, propositional units, quality analysis and analysis of evaluation. The results indicated that for all of these methods of assessment the experimental group performed poorer than the control group.