Cohesion Analysis In The Narratives Of Anomic Aphasics

Aphasic discourse has been investigated from both microscopic and macroscopic perspectives,but the separate analysis of any one perspective is unable to reveal the whole picture of aphasic speakers’ language performance.Cohesion analysis can bridge the noticeable gap between these two perspectives.To date,though,there has been little research on cohesion in aphasic discourses,especially in Chinese context.The present study attempts to explore how people with anomic aphasia and their normal counterparts vary in the quantity of cohesion and the distribution of cohesive devices within Chinese context.Aphasia Bank database was adopted and 48 narratives were selected from 12 participants with and without anomic aphasia performing certain discourse tasks.Each participant was asked to perform four narratives including two picture descriptions(Broken Window & Refused Umbrella)and two story narratives(The Tortoise and The Hare & Cry Wolf).The experimental group includes 6 participants with anomia whose ages ranged from 23 to 54 years old and the control group also includes 6 healthy people who are matched with gender and education level.By adopting a mixed method approach,the present study seeks to address the following research questions: 1)What are the differences in the deployment of cohesion between people with anomic aphasia and normal participants within Chinese context?2)What are the similarities and differences in the distribution of cohesive devices between these two groups within Chinese context?The findings of the study show that the discourse by anomic aphasics was less cohesive than that by their normal counterparts and the two groups’ discourse varied from each other in their distribution of cohesive devices.Specifically,this study has four key findings: Firstly,anomic aphasics experience great difficulty using referential devices such as pronouns.Secondly,they have a distinct tendency to apply ellipsis out of word retrieval failures whereas their normal counterparts basically employ it to achieve discourse cohesion.Thirdly,anomic aphasics frequently use monotonous repetition in lexical devices.Fourthly,anomic aphasics have less diversity than the normal participants in terms of using three categories of conjunctive devices.Results suggest that anomic aphasics have certain deficits in the construction of grammatical cohesion and conjunctive cohesion,and they have more trouble in constructing lexical cohesion.