The language / speech biography of the patient with aphasia as a factor determining the specific process of speech rehabilitation

Abstract

The article considers the relationship between the language / speech biography of the patient with aphasia and the process of his speech rehabilitation. This research project focuses on correlation between the patient’s language / speech biography and systemic connections of words in his mental lexicon. The relevance of the study consists in designing of recovery exercises adapted to the specific language / speech biography of patients with aphasic disorders. The research material includes: 1) statistical data on sociological characteristics of patients, gathered at the local Neurorehabilitation Center from 2014 to 2018; 2) 18 questionnaires filled in by the relatives of patients in question; 3) interviews with healthy Russian native speakers, whose socio-professional characteristics are similar to characteristics of one of the target groups of the patients; 4) a corpus of interview scripts processed with the program Sketch Engine; 5) 16 patients’ speech assessment sheets completed in accordance with the Wasserman scale (it designed to determine speech disorders of patients with a local cerebrovascular accident). The main results of this project are: 1) completing a sociolinguistic portrait of people at risk of aphasia with the similar language and speech biographies; 2) lists of most frequent words, collocations and automated verbal series (phrases and sayings) specific to people without speech pathologies; 3) identification of the language / speech biography features that affect mental lexicon; 4) exercises to speed up speech rehabilitation 5) their validation and assessment of effectiveness in clinical practice.

Keywords: language biography, speech biography, aphasia, mental lexicon, sociolinguistic portrait, speech rehabilitation.