Measuring the coherence of healthy and aphasic discourse production in Chinese using Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Discourse coherence refers to the semantic connectedness of propositions in a connected speech. Various theoretical bases, narrative elicitation tasks, and sample quantifications as well as small sample sizes in most studies resulted in a substantial disparity in findings regarding the micro-linguistic and macro-linguistic aspects of aphasic discourse (Armstrong, 2000). Specifically, while some reports claimed macro-linguistic skills in aphasia to be well-preserved despite lexical, grammatical, and phonological impairments, other studies demonstrated reduced discourse coherence due to omission of important content and higher proportion of irrelevant propositions. In this study we analyzed the discourse structure in aphasic ...