Each year, nearly 800,000 people in the US suffer strokes. Of these, about 38%, or 300,000, experience some degree of aphasia, or loss of linguistic abilities … Regardless of symptoms, many aphasic patients show marked improvement over time, with some studies reporting up to 40% of patients recovering completely within a year of the stroke … In this project, I analyzed the differences in word use between well-recovered aphasic patients (those that perform well on the Western Aphasia Battery) and normal control subjects on a discourse task. Although the aphasic patients exhibited near-normal performance on the word and sentence levels, they produced different patterns of text structure and word use than normal subjects. This project introduced a methodology for statistically analyzing these differences in word use. In the future, a similar approach could be used to develop a diagnostic tool to identify patients with discourse impairments, based on analysis of the words used in a short transcript of speech …

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• Linguistics
• Medicine