Telling a Story or Describing a Picture: Cognitive Differences and
Similarities across Aphasic and Normal Speakers*
Mira Bergelson (1) mira.bergelson@gmail.com, Olga Dragoy (2)
(1) Moscow State University (Russia), (2) University of Groningen (the Netherlands),
Center for Speech Pathology and Neurorehabilitation (Russia)
This study has used the results of the previous experiments by the same authors in studying
storytelling strategies at aphasic speakers and comparing the results with those at the control
group.
The first goal of the study was to analyze aphasic discourse from two different perspectives. It
has been repeatedly shown that expressive speech is far more impaired in particular aphasia
types, which gives grounds for distinguishing between non-fluent and fluent aphasic speakers
(Grodzinsky, 1990). But difficulties at the word and sentence level do not exclude a sensible
story and a communicative success. The reverse may be true as well: spared grammar and
lexis do not assure coherent speech to the point. The question of how strengths and
weaknesses at the local structure level relate to the success at the discourse level presents a
great challenge for aphasic speech research (Armstrong, 2000). The focus on microstructure
allowed to evaluate the degree of lexical and grammatical damage. The macrostructural
perspective, however, dealt with global discourse coherence and focused on how aphasic
speakers would meet the requirements of a specific discourse genre, namely a story.
Differences in discourse elicited from non-fluent and fluent aphasic speakers were explored
and compared to the results of the control group (normal speakers of Russian).
The discourse of four aphasic speakers was analyzed. Two participants (both females, mean
age 41 y.o, 21 months post onset) were non-fluent speakers and two (a male and a female,
mean age 43 y.o, 13 months post onset) were fluent. Two photo pictures were developed for
discourse elicitation, one for the training session, another for the experimental one. Both
pictures were complex rather than compound (Luria, 1966) and represented a complication of
an action with its obvious after-effects. Such pictures are assumed to cause viewers to infer
what happened before, and what may happen afterwards, thus, producing a story. Responses
were audio recorded and orthographically transcribed.
Microlinguistic abilities of aphasic speakers were addressed through the following measures:
number of utterances, mean number of clauses per utterance, proportion of agrammatic
clauses, mean length of utterance, proportion or nouns, pronouns and predicates. As predicted,
the discourse microstructure was more impaired in non-fluent speakers: their utterances were
fewer, shorter, less accurate, and contained few pronouns that are the means of local
coherence.
Macrolinguistic measures included story component scheme and its variables, such as
Storyworld and Non-StoryWorld clauses, the former being divided into Main Line Story
Event clauses (semantically non-iterative, non-habitual and temporarily bounded), and
Durative-Descriptive clauses (states of affairs which persist over some interval of time in the
discourse rather than occurring at one discrete instant in the discourse world). Non-Story
World clauses refer to Evaluations (linguistic means that make it clear to the listeners which
circumstances and events are crucial for the point being made (Polanyi, 1989)) and verbal
interaction between the storyteller and the interviewer. Evaluations (including Coda) provided
more insight as regards the goals of this study, while verbal interaction clauses reflecting
(inter)personal dynamics were set aside for further research.
The component scheme analysis showed that non-fluent speakers’ discourse included, on
average, 72% Main Line clauses and 14% Descriptive clauses, while fluent speakers used a
*
This research was supported by the Russian Foundation of Humanities grant: РГНФ 08-04-00165а and by the
Russian Foundation for Basic research grant РФФИ 09-06-00334-а
comparable number of Storyworld clauses of the two types – 41% and 39% correspondingly.
As for the Non-StoryWorld evaluations, those clauses were as rare as Descriptive clauses in
the non-fluent discourse (14%), but the proportion of evaluations in the fluent discourse
equaled to the proportion of Storyworld clauses (42%). Thus, non-fluent speakers mainly
used a narrative strategy, and non-fluent speakers alternated their story telling with descriptive
and evaluative digressions.
The results support the double dissociation between micro- and macrostructure of the fluent
and non-fluent discourse elicited in the storytelling task. Microlinguistic breakdown was
shown to be more prominent in the non-fluent group, but despite (or even due to) the limited
verbal capacities those speakers produced a coherent story to the point. The procedure and
materials were specifically developed to elicit a narrative discourse, and non-fluent aphasic
speakers successfully performed the task. On the contrary, the microlinguistic level was
relatively spared in the fluent group, but they constantly shifted from story telling to picture
description and evaluations, which made their discourse incoherent.
The relationship between breakdown and success at those two levels - micro- and
macrostructural, or sentence VS discourse - was further explored using the data from the
normal speakers control group. Previous research on discourse coherence at aphasic speakers
(Olness 2006) shows that elicitations that request temporal sequencing result in more
narrative discourse type, as compared to the standard clinical picture elicitations resulting in
descriptive discourse type. The severity of condition at the patients will in the first place
affect the ability to produce a story and thus make them slide to picture description. The
distinction between the two types of discourse is based on the form (past VS present) and
function (story main line event VS descriptive state of affairs) of the verb.
It is presumed that normal speakers when requested to produce a story will not have problems
of sliding into a descriptive discourse associated with cognitive deficit at the aphasic speakers.
Still, three of the four normal speakers (matched by age and gender with the aphasic group)
demonstrated a very clear example of a descriptive discourse type in our experiment.
Concluding the ‘story’ they would comment on that with visible surprise (рассказа не
получилось .. в общем-то . описание получилось).
It can be explained by two prominent features of the photo pictures used for the experiment:
their complexity (to be measured by the number of different objects in the picture) and by its
emotional intensity (to be described by the complexity of the emotional states expressed by
two human figures in the picture). The subjects are uncertain about what’s going on between
the acting agents in the picutre. As telling a story presumes creating a cognitive picture that
includes participants, sequence of events and - most importantly – a point to be made,
confusion about participants and events going on prevents speakers from making a point,
which leads to their easy shift from the story telling to describing the visually presented
material. Linguistic traces of this shift are clearly visible at the aphasic speakers as well, but
due to their speech impairments they are given a different interpretation. One important
conclusion to be made out of the control group data is that at the aphasic speakers this shift
may be explained by similar reasons, which is not acknowledged in the literature.
References
Armstrong, E. (2000). Aphasic discourse analysis: The story so far. Aphasiology, 14, 875-892.
Grodzinsky, Y. (1990). Theoretical Perspectives on Language Deficits. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Luria, A. R. (1966). Higher Cortical Functions in Man. New York: Basic Books.
Olness, G.S. (2006). Genre, verb, and coherence in picture-elicited discourse of
adults with aphasia. Aphasiology, 20 (2/3/4), 175–187
Polanyi, L. (1989). Telling the American Story. A Structral and Cultural Analysis of Conversational
Storytelling. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.