Naming and story gist in aphasia (Richardson et al., 2018)

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between picture naming performance and the ability to communicate the gist, or essential elements, of a story. We also sought to determine if this relationship varied according to Western Aphasia Battery–Revised (WAB-R; Kertesz, 2007) aphasia subtype.

Method: Demographic information, test scores, and transcripts of 258 individuals with aphasia completing 3 narrative tasks were retrieved from the AphasiaBank database. Narratives were subjected to a main concept analysis to determine gist production. A correlation analysis was used to investigate the relationship between naming scores and main concept production for the whole group of persons with aphasia and for WAB-R subtypes separately.

Results: We found strong correlations between naming test scores and narrative gist production for the large sample of persons with aphasia. However, the strength of the correlations varied by WAB-R subtype.

Conclusions: Picture naming may accurately predict gist production for individuals with Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia, but not for other WAB-R subtypes. Given the current reprioritization of outcome measurement, picture naming may not be an appropriate surrogate measure for functional communication for all persons with aphasia.

Supplemental Material S1. Western Aphasia Battery–Revised Aphasia Quotient (WAB-R-AQ) component scores and spontaneous speech fluency scores for all participants and by aphasia subtype.

Richardson, J. D., Dalton, S. G., Fromm, D., Forbes, M., Holland, A., & MacWhinney, B. (2018). The relationship between confrontation naming and story gist production in aphasia. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27(1S), 406–422.