ABSTRACT
Various approaches of clinical assessment of disordered discourse have been proposed to facilitate the evaluation of aphasia beyond the single word level. According to Spreen and Risser (2003), during the period between the 1930s and 1950s, early investigations of aphasic language production mainly focused on screening procedures and the development of clinical batteries for diagnostic purposes. It was not until the 1960s that researchers started to investigate open
ended free speech by measuring different linguistic parameters. Many of these clinically oriented tools were intended to assist clinicians in quantifying aphasic production by native English speakers. Their results might serve as an initial assessment of a speaker’s linguistic abilities, which might then lead to more indepth and detailed evaluation of aphasia. A small number of these systems have also been used to investigate the progressive changes of disordered narratives across time, such as the positive change in aphasia recovery or regression over the course of different stages in dementia. More specifically, open ended or spontaneous language samples have been analyzed in terms of their rate, prosody, length of production, pronunciation, degree of grammatical correctness, and distribution of errors. The above pioneering work became the basis for the later development of other discourse quantitative systems.
