Story retelling analyses as a function of visual cues using information units for persons with aphasia

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate performance on story retelling procedures in persons with aphasia (PWA) depending on the presence of visual cues using information units (IU). In addition, IU metrics were correlated with linguistic measures and aphasia severity. Methods: Fifteen PWA and 15 age- and education-matched normal individuals participated in the study. A familiar story was presented either under auditory only (AO) or auditory visual (AV) conditions in story retelling procedures. Dependent variables from IU checklists included number of IU (#IU), percent of IU (%IU), number of IU per minute (#IU/min), and percent of IU per minute (%IU/min). Results: PWA demonstrated significantly worse performance than the normal group across all IU-related measures. The main effect for the condition was significant in #IU and %IU with better performance on the AV than AO, whereas the main effect was not significant for #IU/min and %IU/min. The twoway interaction was not significant in any of the IU measures. There were significant correlations among IU metrics and linguistic outcomes (number of utterances, number of words per minute, words, #CIU, #CIU/min, %CIU, and %CIU/min). IU-related measures were also correlated with aphasia severity. Conclusion: Visual cues were beneficial for eliciting more linguistic units from persons with aphasia. The current study is the first attempt to apply IU metrics to Korean speakers with aphasia, confirming the clinical utility of IU metrics as an efficient method for analyzing the connected speech samples produced by persons with aphasia.