AVALIAÇÃO DA PRODUÇÃO DISCURSIVA ORAL NO ENVELHECIMENTO E SUA RELAÇÃO COM ESCOLARIDADE E HÁBITOS DE LEITURA E ESCRITA: UMA REVISÃO SISTEMÁTICA

A presente revisão sistemática tem por objetivo verificar quais as tarefas comumente utilizadas para elucidação da produção discursiva oral do adulto idoso e sua relação com escolaridade e hábitos de leitura e escrita. Para tanto, buscaram-se artigos publicados nas bases de dados Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, MEDLINE e LILACS. Os termos utilizados foram (“discourse production” OR “oral production” OR “narrative production”) AND (aging OR elderly OR “older adults”) AND (education OR schooling OR “reading habits” OR “writing habits”). Os critérios de seleção incluíram: (a) artigo original avaliado por pares; (b) com foco na produção discursiva oral no envelhecimento típico; (c) publicado entre 1990 e 2019. Foram encontrados, no total, 456 registros, dos quais 393 foram excluídos pelo título e 12 após leitura na íntegra, por não se relacionarem ao tema. De acordo com os critérios de seleção, 19 artigos foram selecionados. Verificou-se que grande parte das pesquisas utiliza tarefas baseadas em estímulos visuais, sobretudo em seu formato sequencial, enquanto uma pequena parte utiliza tarefas baseadas em eventos autobiográficos, conversações livres ou descrição de procedimentos. Algumas pesquisas compararam a produção discursiva oral da amostra em questão em diferentes tarefas. Poucos estudos incluíram a variável escolaridade em seus experimentos, enquanto nenhum estudo investigou o efeito dos hábitos de leitura e escrita. Devido à sua complexidade, estudos no nível do discurso precisam considerar a influência do tipo de tarefa para a elucidação do processamento, assim como fatores sociodemográficos e culturais dos seus participantes.

A Systematically Conducted Scoping Review of the Evidence and Fidelity of Treatments for Verb and Sentence Deficits in Aphasia: Sentence Treatments

Purpose: This review article synthesizes and evaluates the evidence for sentence production treatments in aphasia, systematically charting impairment-based and functional communication outcomes. It reports (a) the level of evidence and fidelity of sentence treatments; (b) the impact of treatment on production of trained and untrained verbs and sentences, functional communication, and discourse; and (c) the potential active ingredients of treatment. Method: The search included studies from January 1980 to June 2019. The level of evidence of each study was documented, as was fidelity in terms of treatment delivery, enactment, and receipt. Studies were also categorized according to treatment methods used. Results: Thirty-three studies were accepted into the review and predominantly constituted Level 4 evidence (e.g., case control studies and case series). Thirty studies (90%) described treatment in sufficient detail to allow replication, but dosage was poorly reported, and fidelity of treatment was rarely assessed. The most commonly reported treatment techniques were mapping (10 studies: 30%), predicate argument structure treatment (six studies: 18%), and verb network strengthening treatment (five studies: 15%). Production of trained sentences improved for 83% of participants, and improvements generalized to untrained sentences for 59% of participants. Functional communication was rarely assessed, but discourse production improved for 70% of participants. Conclusions: The evidence for sentence treatments is predominantly generated from Level 4 studies. Treatments were effective for the majority of participants regarding trained sentence and discourse production. However, there is inconsistent use of statistical analysis to verify improvements, and diverse outcome measures are used, which makes interpretation of the evidence difficult. The quality of sentence treatment research would be improved by agreeing a core set of outcome measures and extended by ascertaining the views of participants on sentence treatments.

Analysis of Discourse Production to Assess Cognitive Communication Deficits Following Mild Traumatic Brain Injury With and Without Posttraumatic Stress

Purpose: Cognitive communication deficits can be difficult to assess in individuals with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). However, the use of discourse analysis as a direct and sensitive metric of cognitive communication skills has shown promising clinical utility for other TBI severity levels. This exploratory study investigated discourse production in service members and veterans (SMVs) with uncomplicated mTBI with and without posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and SMVs with neither mTBI or PTSD. Method: Fifteen SMVs with mTBI and PTSD, 26 with mTBI, and 25 controls with no brain injury (NBI) and without PTSD were given a wordless picture story to elicit spontaneous discourse. Discourse samples were analyzed for global coherence, word count, the use of negative emotion words, cognitive process words, nonfluencies, and story completeness. Results: Results revealed a significant difference between the mTBI ( Mdn = 3.33) and NBI ( Mdn = 3.50) groups, χ 2 (3) = 6.044, p = .017, ε 2 = .03, for global coherence. Word count differed significantly between the mTBI + PTSD ( Mdn = 135) and NBI ( Mdn = 195) groups, χ 2 (3) = 7.968, p = .006, ε 2 = .06. No other group differences were observed. Discussion: Structural features of discourse production may serve as potential markers of cognitive communication deficits in mTBI. Furthermore, PTSD may contribute to verbal fluency deficits in individuals with mTBI. Additional research is needed to develop discourse-related measures that are more sensitive to the effects of mTBI and PTSD.

Picture Description of the Western Aphasia Battery Picnic Scene: Reference Data for the French Canadian Population

Purpose The main aim of this study is to provide French Canadian reference data for quantitative measures extracted from connected speech samples elicited by the Western Aphasia Battery–Revised picnic scene, a discourse task frequently used in clinical assessment of acquired language disorders. Method Our sample consisted of 62 healthy French Canadian adults divided in two age groups: a 50- to 69-year-old group and a 70- to 90-year-old group. Results High interrater reliability scores were obtained for most of the variables. Most connected speech variables did not demonstrate an age effect. However, the 70- to 90-year-old group produced more repetitions than the 50- to 69-year-old group and displayed reduced communication efficiency (number of information content units per minute). Conclusion These findings contribute to building a reference data set to analyze descriptive discourse production in clinical settings.

TRACES OF BLACK FREEDOM IN THE MACHINE: ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF DIGITAL BLACK RELIGION

There was a time when one wanted to learn about Black religion you went to church, the Black Church to be more specific. The “all-in-one agency” which W.E. B. DuBois described the Black Church as certainly operated as a centralized and essential aspect of Black life. Its networks have come to signify Black believers’ emancipatory visions since its beginning during slavery in America. Today Black users’ contemporary engagement with digital technology has both broadened and complicated the scholarly understanding of the Black Church and Black religion to include more than its Christian manifestation. A number of works provide important theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of black digital use, digital structures of inequality, and counter-discourse production. On the topic of digital religion, works have emphasized the importance of digital technology in mediating religious experience. Yet, despite findings that people of African descent are often early adopters of technology, at the intersections of blackness, religion, and digital technology scholarly work remains sparse. This paper provides both a survey and framework for the study of digital Black religion. The work of Black religious media scholars is paired with that of Heidi Campbell and others writing on digital religion to offer a needed approach to the articulation and study of digital Black religion as a tradition rooted in notions of freedom.

Copula Choice is Associated with Discourse Integration Skills in Spanish-Speaking Children

The present study investigates the relationship between discourse integration skills and Spanish copula choice in monolingual Chilean Spanish-speaking children. Previous research has focused on determining the age at which children associate estar to a transitory property and ser to an inherent property (Holtheuer, Carolina. 2012. Spanish-speaking children do not always overuse estar. Revista Signos 45(78). 3–19, Holtheuer, Carolina & Johanna Rendle-Short. 2013. Ser and estar: Corrective input to children’s errors of the Spanish copula verbs. First Language 33(2). 155–167, Schmitt, Cristina & Karen Miller. 2007. Making discourse dependent decisions: The case of the copulas ser and estar in Spanish. Lingua 117(11). 1907–1929, Sera, Maria. 1992. To be or to be: Use and acquisition of the Spanish copulas. Journal of Memory and Language 31. 408–427, Requena, Pablo, Astrid Román-Hernández & Karen Miller. 2015. Children’s knowledge of the Spanish copulas ser and estar with novel adjectives. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics 22. 193–207), showing that by 2 years of age children know the categorial distribution of the two copulas, but that at 5 years of age only some children, but not all children, have knowledge of the transitory/inherent distinction that often arises when the same adjective occurs with one or the other copula. The present study seeks to extend the latter research by further investigating the factors that might influence why only some children associate estar to transitory properties at 5 years of age, a question that will not only shed light on when the subtle meaning differences of the copulas are acquired, but also how they are acquired. Maienborn, Claudia (2005. A discourse-based account of Spanish ser/estar. Linguistics 43(1). 155–180) notes that estar is discourse-linked, while ser is not. Specifically, the use of estar with an adjectival predicate to compare changes to a person across different stages of their life relies on one’s ability to integrate the larger discourse (i.e., these various stages) into their statement. In the present study, to determine whether Spanish-speaking children’s production of the copula estar with adjectival predicates was associated with their discourse integration abilities, children were presented with both a Copula Elicitation Task and a Discourse Production Task. Analyses revealed an association between children’s discourse integration skills and their use of estar with adjectives to express transitory properties, a finding that indicates that children’s acquisition of estar is mastered late – at least in part because of their late development of discourse integration skills more generally. Most studies on the acquisition of estar with adjectival complements have focused primarily on comprehension. Experimental studies on children’s production of estar are rare. As such, this experimental study is one of the few that examines children’s use of estar in production and the first, as far as we know, that provides empirical support for the link between discourse integration skills in children and their use of estar with adjectival predicates.

Content Word Production during Discourse in Aphasia: Deficits in Word Quantity, Not Lexical–Semantic Complexity

Although limited and reduced connected speech production is one, if not the most, prominent feature of aphasia, few studies have examined the properties of content words produced during discourse in aphasia, in comparison to the many investigations of single-word production. In this study, we used a distributional analysis approach to investigate the properties of content word production during discourse by 46 participants spanning a wide range of chronic poststroke aphasia and 20 neurotypical adults, using different stimuli that elicited three discourse genres (descriptive, narrative, and procedural). Initially, we inspected the discourse data with respect to the quantity of production, lexical–semantic diversity, and psycholinguistic features (frequency and imageability) of content words. Subsequently, we created a “lexical–semantic landscape,” which is sensitive to subtle changes and allowed us to evaluate the pattern of changes in discourse production across groups. Relative to neurotypical adults, all persons with aphasia (both fluent and nonfluent) showed significant reduction in the quantity and diversity of production, but the lexical–semantic complexity of word production directly mirrored neurotypical performance. Specifically, persons with aphasia produced the same rate of nouns/verbs, and their discourse samples covered the full range of word frequency and imageability, albeit with reduced word quantity. These findings provide novel evidence that, unlike in other disorders (e.g., semantic dementia), discourse production in poststroke aphasia has relatively preserved lexical–semantic complexity but demonstrates significantly compromised quantity of content word production. Voxel-wise lesion-symptom mapping using both univariate and multivariate approaches revealed left frontal regions particularly the pars opercularis, IC, and central and frontal opercular cortices supporting word retrieval during connected speech, irrespective of word class or their lexical–semantic complexity.

Masculinity, Disability, and Politics in Polish War-Disabled Memoirs (1971)

This article offers a contextualized analysis of disabled Polish war veterans’ memoirs published in 1971. This set of documents constitutes a remarkable source for understanding how masculinity and male corporeality are narrated and negotiated between politics, social and family lives, private and public spheres. The article focuses on the conventions and conditions of war-disability discourse production in Poland during the long sixties; it also highlights biographical tensions between appreciation of veterans’ masculinity in political discourse and their often emasculated position in social structures, families and private lives.

Le langage comme pouvoir de création normé. À propos des cours de Paul Ricœur sur le langage (1962-1967)

Between 1962 and 1967/68, Ricœur devoted several courses to the question of language. Even though there are many traces of these lectures in the articles and essays published during these years (and collected in part in The Conflict of Interpretations), they have so far attracted little attention from the research community. However, they mark a decisive turning point in Ricœur’s thinking and lay the systematic foundation of the hermeneutics of the text that he would deploy in his later works. The article first clarifies the place occupied by these courses in Ricœur’s work. It then presents the archival material and characterizes the specific approach of each of the courses on the basis of Ricœur’s preparatory manuscripts. In a final section, three particularly instructive aspects of the courses are discussed: the shift from symbol to metaphor (in discussion with Greimas and Jakobson), the articulation of analytic philosophy and phenomenology (Frege and Husserl), and finally the program of a transcendental foundation of the rules of discourse production (Strawson, Wittgenstein and Chomsky).

Storytelling in speakers with and without brain damage: A macrolinguistic approach

Narrative discourse is investigated in clinical and healthy populations. This study explored the discourse strategies used to tell stories, comparing the patterns of people with left- and right-hemisphere brain damage, as well as healthy speakers. We analyzed picture-elicited discourses by four people with aphasia, two people with right hemisphere damage, and four healthy speakers. We examined their microlinguistic properties, as well as macrolinguistic features, such as the discourse production type of utterances and patterns of story component usage. We identified two storytelling strategies used by the speakers: a narrative strategy marked by a prevalence of narrative discourse production type utterances and scarce use of evaluation clauses, and a quasi-narrative strategy with the opposite pattern. These strategies were used by both healthy speakers and participants with brain damage