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Background: Light verbs are highly frequent and semantically impoverished words. It is currently not known whether light verb production in discourse tasks differs by age or for people with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). Aims: The purpose of the current study was two-fold: (1) to determine whether there is a relationship between age and the proportion of light verbs produce during a narrative discourse task; and (2) to determine whether people with DAT produce a different proportion of light verbs compared with neurotypical adults. Methods & Procedures: A total of 469 neurotypical adults and 12 participants with DAT produced narratives from a wordless picture book. Outcome & Results: The results indicated that light verb production increases as a function of age, even when controlling for education, and people with DAT produced a higher light verb--word ratio compared with neurotypical adults when matched for age and education. Conclusion & Implication: Light verb use may increase as a function of age due to declines in retrieval ability. These declines are not only more pronounced in people with DAT, but also semantic knowledge deficits may contribute to a reliance on light verbs. What this paper adds: Light verbs are typically some of the first verbs learned due to their simple semantic construction and high frequency. However, two things are unknown: (1) how light verbs changed across the adult lifespan; and (2) whether cognitive impairment changes light verb production. The study found that light verb production increases as a function of age, and that people with DAT used a higher ratio of light verbs to words in a narrative task compared with neurotypical adults. However, despite the findings, more research is needed to determine their clinical utility. Future research may wish to investigate whether light verbs (1) facilitate comprehension in older adults or (2) may be used in cognitive-linguistic assessments for cognitive impairments.

Background: Although discourse-level assessments contribute to predicting real-world performance in persons with aphasia (PWA), the use of discourse measures is uncommon in clinical settings due to resource-heavy procedures. Moreover, assessing function word use in discourse requires the arduous procedure of defining grammatical categories for each word in language transcripts. Aims: The purpose of this exploratory study was twofold: (1) to develop core function word lists as a clinician-friendly means of evaluating function word use in discourse; and (2) to examine the ability of the core function word measure to differentiate PWA from cognitively healthy adults and persons with fluent aphasia from non-fluent aphasia. Methods & Procedures: The 25 most commonly used function words (core function words) were extracted from narrative language samples from 470 cognitively healthy adults, which were divided into seven age groups (20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s). The percent agreement of core function words for 11 PWA (fluent aphasia = 5; non-fluent aphasia = 6) and 11 age- and education-matched controls were then calculated. Percent agreement for the core function words produced was compared between the controls and the PWA group, and between participants with fluent aphasia and non-fluent aphasia. Outcomes & Results: The results indicated that PWA produced fewer core function words from the lists than the control group, and that core function word use was strongly correlated with aphasia severity. Persons with non-fluent aphasia produced fewer core function words than those with fluent aphasia, although this could be a confound of aphasia classification from the use of the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB)--Revised. Conclusions & Implications: Core function word lists consisting of a limited number of items for quantifying function word use in discourse remain in a nascent stage of development. However, the findings are consistent with previous studies analysing the total production of function words in language samples produced by PWA. Therefore, core function words may potentially serve as a clinician-friendly manner of quantifying function words produced in discourse.

Background: Discourse analysis procedures are time consuming and impractical in a clinical setting. Critical to clinicians are simple and informative discourse measures that require minimal time and labour to complete. Many studies, however, have overlooked difficulties that clinicians face. We recently developed core lexicon lists for nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs for two narrative discourse tasks with healthy control groups. Core lexicon lists consist of important lexical items required to produce coherently meaningful discourse in response to discourse tasks. Measuring core lexicon is useful for quantifying word retrieval impairments at the discourse level in clinical populations. Aims: To apply an age-based core lexicon list for nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs for the wordless picture books Good Dog Carl (1985) and Picnic (1984) and to determine how well the lists measured linguistic impairments in persons with aphasia (PWA). Materials & Methods: Lemma forms were extracted from 470 control participants who were divided into seven age groups. Twenty-five core lexicons were identified for four word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) among the seven age groups. The nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs for each PWA (N = 11) were then compared with the core lexicon for their respective age group. Per cent agreement was computed by comparing the number of total items within each list to the number of items that PWA produced. A Spearman's correlation coefficient was computed between the WAB-R AQ and the per cent agreement for each word type for PWA. Outcomes & Results: The percentage of agreement for each word type among the age cohorts ranged between 56% and 96%. Of the four word types, core verbs significantly correlated with the WAB AQs for both discourse tasks. A post-hoc analysis found significant differences between fluent and non-fluent aphasia for core verbs. Conclusions & Implications: Core lexicon analysis appears to be a practical way to capture impairments in word retrieval at the discourse level. Core verbs may be a better indicator to understand holistic language performances for PWA. Use of the core lexicon checklist can serve as an option to reconcile ecological validity with clinical usability.

Semantic memory is relatively stable across the lifespan (LaBarge, Edwards, & Knesevich, 1986). However, most research has been conducted at the single concept level (LaBarge et al., 1986, Spaniol et al., 2006). Few researchers have examined how semantic knowledge is used in discourse. The purpose of the study, then, was to determine the proportion of semantic knowledge and category domains used in discourse produced by younger and older participants. Cognitively healthy, younger (n = 30, aged 20-39) and older (n = 30, aged 60-89) participants told stories that were transcribed and coded for 10 domains of semantic knowledge and also "living" and "nonliving things." Results indicated group differences for the proportion of semantic knowledge type, "sound," and for the category type, living things. These findings extend previous research on semantic features into the realm of discourse and indicate the importance of studying semantic features and categories within discourse.

Successful spoken discourse requires a speaker to be informative to deliver a coherent, meaningful message. The informativeness of discourse can be conveyed by the variety of vocabulary produced (i.e., lexical diversity [LD]), the typicality of vocabulary items used (i.e., core lexicon [CL]), and the amount of relevant content produced (i.e., information units). Yet, it is well documented that older adults produce less informative content compared to younger adults despite relatively subtle changes to LD. The typicality of core lexical items has not been assessed in healthy aging. Paradoxically, these results indicate that some aspects of discourse informativeness remain stable or even improve across the adult lifespan, while other aspects decline. The purpose of the current study is to understand how microlinguistic processes of informativeness change across the adult lifespan. The cross‐sectional study included narrative language samples from two wordless picture books collected from 420 healthy participants between 20 and 89 years old. LD and percent of correct information units (%CIUs) were analyzed, as well as CL nouns and verbs. The results indicate that %CIUs and CL nouns demonstrate a quadratic decline starting around the ages of 40 and 60, respectively. LD shows a slight linear decline as a function of age. CL verbs are resistant to age‐related changes but are influenced greater by education. The differing findings across the microlinguistic measures can be explained by the weakened connections within the language system and the differential characteristics of the measures. The findings contribute to the aging literature by systematically identifying the trajectory of how variables of informativeness change with age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many persons with aphasia (PWA) have limited access to speech-language treatment (SLT) due to limited funding, speechlanguage pathologist shortages, geographical barriers, physical disabilities, transportation barriers, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study was to determine if telepractice is an effective and feasible service delivery model for PWA. Ten PWA completed 8 hours of remote treatment over 4 weeks. Synchronous telepractice sessions employed Oral Reading for Language in Aphasia (ORLA) and Conversational Script Training (CST). Pre- and post-assessment outcome measures included the Communication Activities of Daily Living-3 (CADL-3) and the Communication Confidence Rating Scale for Aphasia (CCRSA). Participants completed a telepractice satisfaction survey following post-assessment. All participants demonstrated improvements in CCRSA scores, total words produced correctly on trained CST stimuli, and total words produced correctly on trained ORLA stimuli. No differences were noted in CADL-3 scores. All participants were highly satisfied with telepractice as a service delivery model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: People with aphasia (PWA) and their families identify as their priority the ability to use language at the discourse level in order to meet their daily communicative needs. However, measuring connected speech can be a challenging task due to the complex and multidimensional nature of discourse. As a result, professionals often depend on confrontation naming tests to identify and measure impaired underlying cognitive mechanisms that are also hypothesized to be important for discourse production. Aims: In the current study, we investigated the validity of making inferences about discourse performance based on scores from confrontation naming tests. Specifically, we investigated the strength of the relationship between word retrieval abilities, and the ability to convey information during discourse production. Method & Procedures: Data from 118 monolingual PWA were retrieved from AphasiaBank and analyzed using structural equation modeling. Performance in confrontation naming tests was modeled as a latent variable based on the Boston Naming Test, the Western Aphasia Battery - R Naming Subtest, and the Verb Naming Test. Performance at the discourse level was modeled based on indices of informativeness in three discourse tasks (free speech, eventcasts, and story re-tell). Informativeness was quantified using the percentage of Correct Information Units. Outcomes and Results: Based on the fit statistics, the model exhibited adequate fit, indicating that the relationship between confrontation picture naming and informativeness was adequately reflected in the model. We found a strong relationship between confrontation naming test performance and discourse informativeness (standardized regression coefficient between the two latent factors = .79). Conclusions: Performance on confrontation naming tests was a strong predictor of the amount of information PWA communicated during discourse production. However, our results also highlight that performance on the latter cannot be predicted solely from the former, as evidenced by the large proportion of unexplained variance in the informativeness latent variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background:Researchers have demonstrated that people with aphasia (PWA) have preserved semantic knowledge. However, some PWA have impaired access to certain types of knowledge more than others. Yet, all these studies used single concepts. It has not been demonstrated whether PWA have difficulty accessing certain types of features within a discourse sample. Aims:The main goals of this study were to determine whether semantic knowledge and two category types were used differently within discourse produced by participants with anomic aphasia and healthy controls. Methods & Procedures:Participants with anomic aphasia (n = 19) and healthy controls (n = 19) told stories that were transcribed and coded for 10 types of semantic knowledge and two category types, living and non-living things. Outcomes & Results:A Poisson regression model was conducted. The results indicated a significant difference between the groups for the semantic knowledge types,soundandinternal state, but no difference was found for category types. Yet the distribution of semantic knowledge and category types produced within the discourse samples were similar between the groups. Conclusions:PWA might have differential access to certain types of semantic knowledge within discourse production, but it does not rise to the level of categorical deficits. These findings extend single-concept research into the realm of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers insights with regard to systematizing discourse measurement in aphasia research. It references the issue's article by authors Aimee Dietz and Mary Boyle. Topics discussed include meta analysis conducted regarding the matter, methodology for the advancement of core set outcomes for aphasia and sample sizes in aphasiology. Concerns with regard to transcription and handling of transcription data are also presented.