Comparison of the effect of discourse context on macrolinguistic and microlinguistic parameters in Turkish-speaking individuals with aphasia and neurotypical adults using language sample analysis

Introduction: In this study, the narrative skills of Turkish-speaking individuals with aphasia and neurotypical adults were compared on microlinguistic and macrolinguistic parameters across five different discourse contexts, and the effects of aphasia subtype and communicative context on language performance were examined.Methods: A total of 39 participants took part: 14 adults with fluent aphasia, 12 with non-fluent aphasia, and 13 neurotypical controls matched for age and education level. The study was conducted at two centers, Hacettepe University Hospital and Gaziler Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Training and Research Hospital. To assess narrative skills, language samples were collected through semi-structured conversation, two separate picture descriptions, and sequential picture narration. In the transcribed narratives, the following parameters were analyzed: speech rate, mean length of utterance, number of complex sentences, number of phonemic/semantic paraphasias, token ratio, speech fluency and efficiency, and number of content units. All analyses were performed manually by two independent researchers, and reliability was established through consensus. Statistical analysis was performed using IBM SPSS 26.0.Results: Significant differences were found between groups in all parameters. Individuals with non-fluent aphasia consistently showed poorer language performance on all structural measures. On the functional measure, the production of content units, the lowest values were obtained by individuals with fluent aphasia (Table 1). In the comparison testing the effect of discourse context, a difference was found only in content unit production by the neurotypical control group; adults without language or speech disorders produced the highest number of content units in conversation, which is the less structured task (Table 2).Discussion/Conclusion: Integrating structural and functional approaches in language sample analysis yields a more comprehensive picture of language performance. Each discourse context was found to have its own advantages and disadvantages for analyzing narrative performance. For a holistic analysis of language performance, clinicians are advised to collect language samples in more than one discourse context.Keywords: