Abstract:

Surprisingly little is known about long-term changes, adaptation and recovery in aphasia. The objective of the study was to examine the changes in the picture of agrammatism over a 20 years period post stroke. The subject of this study was a male person JS with Broca’s aphasia. During the follow-up, we investigated the development of lexicon and grammatical constructions in conversation, especially in story telling. In addition, JS was assessed with the WAB four times during the follow-up. The conversational data were collected from informal conversations. The sample of 200 consecutive words was extracted from the beginning of the each conversation sample to compare the possible changes in the proportion and use of word classes. JS’s WAB scores showed only minor changes during the follow-up period but the percentage of verbs used grew from 8% to 19%. JS had been clearly able to develop his conversational and story-telling skills.

Author: Anu Klippi, Marja-Liisa Helasvuo