ABSTRACT
Systematic analyses and sophisticated quantification of disordered language samples, together with careful comparison with the performance of healthy controls, allow researchers to capture the essential clinical characteristics of speakers with acquired language impairments at the discourse level. Not only can the results inform scientists of important information for the testing and proposal of language models or processing theories of narrative production, but can also provide users with suitable guidelines to facilitate clinical applications on the
evaluation of discourse deficits, such as those commonly exhibited by speakers with aphasia. A few approaches of research oriented narrative analyses will be discussed in this chapter. These systems were mainly developed in a research context to enable an examinee to objectively and systematically quantify oral narratives, and to better understand the linguistic characteristics beyond the sentential level among individuals with aphasia.
