Cohesive Properties in the Discourse of Persian-speaking with Transcortical Motor Aphasia

Although discourse properties of aphasic patients have beeninvestigated utilizing microlinguistic as well as macrolinguistic approaches, therehave been only a few studies in the Persian setting which have tried to investigatediscourse properties of these brain-damaged patients. Previous researchers haveconcentrated mainly on the two most notorious types of aphasia, namely Brocaand Wernicke. Thus, the coherence properties of transcortical motor patientshave never been given serious consideration by scientists. The current studyaimed to investigate whether and how transcortical aphasia patients differ fromtheir healthy counterparts in the cohesive properties of their discourse with theaim of presenting an exhaustive account of the issue and filling the gap existingin the literature.

In doing so, via mixed-methods approach, cohesive devices in thediscourse of six transcortical motor aphasics (3 participants of each gender,mean age, 56.9 years) and 6 healthy non-aphasic controls (3 participants of eachgender, mean age=57.4 years) were compared.

The results corroborate our hypotheses that the discourse oftranscortical aphasics is less cohesive than that of healthy individuals, and theyhave lots of challenges in constructing grammatically cohesive devices.

The findings further demonstrate that discourse could be differentlydisrupted in diverse forms of aphasia. It is recommended that more research beconducted on different languages so as to shed more light on the issue, enrichingour understanding of the nature of this disease.