Main concept analysis for acquired deficits of spoken narratives: Preliminary data on inter-rater agreement and potential application to the korean-speaking population

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the inter-rater agreement of the Main Concept Analysis (MCA), a proposition-based system for analyzing the presence, accuracy, completeness, and efficiency of content in spoken narratives of speakers with aphasia. Twenty-one MCA assessments were administered to thirteen participants recruited from an intensive aphasia treatment program. Six MCA indices were applied to the language samples, which were crosschecked to determine discrepancies of results across raters. The present results were consistent with similar studies in the literature, thus indicating that the Main Concept Analysis is a reliable assessment battery. Given the simple, quick, but objective procedures for language quantification, it is argued that the Main Concept Analysis can easily be adopted to the Korean- speaking population for clinical analysis of discourse.