AphasiaBank

Examples

This page provides short video examples of common features from the connected speech of people with aphasia. Most of these examples are from participants who did the standard AphasiaBank discourse protocol; others are from additional corpora contributed to AphasiaBank. We express our deep gratitude to the participants and our colleagues who contributed language samples or facilitated the collection of language samples.

Features are organized at the word-level and sentence-level for purposes of illustration, though it will be obvious that some features occur at multiple levels (e.g., empty speech can be a word like “thing” or an utterance that is general and vague). It will also be obvious that an illustration of one feature may include illustrations of other features (e.g., jargon may include neologisms, circumlocutions may include empty speech and paraphasias).

These are intended to be brief examples of features. In depth explanations and case examples of aphasia are available at the AphasiaBank Grand Rounds. For more context surrounding these examples, AphasiaBank members can go to the Browsable Database to find the transcripts that correspond to these ID numbers.

Word-level Feature	CC Code	Notation	Description	Video examples
Anomia	$ANO	--	Word-finding problems which may be manifested in a variety of ways including long pauses, word fragments, fillers, trailed-off/unfinished utterances, sighs and other signs of frustration	latency8 anomia8 thompson05a williamson18a
Circumlocution	$CIR	[+ clr]	Indirect, roundabout language to describe a word or concept	bu09a tucson04a wozniak01a wright202a
Conduit d'approche	$CDA	--	Successive attempts at a target word; the attempts approximate the target phonetically; final production may or not be successful	kurland01a williamson06a wright203a
Jargon	$JAR	[+ jar, xxx]	Fluent, prosodically correct output, resembling English syntax and inflection, but containing largely meaningless speech; sometimes it is intelligible (and can be transcribed), sometimes it is unintelligible	adler06a kansas05a MSU08b tap09a
Neologism	$NEO	[* n]	Non-word substitution for a target word (usually with less than 50% overlap of phonemes between error and target); target word may be known or unknown	adler05a neologisms7
Perseveration	$PER	[+ per], [* s:per]	Repetition of a previously used word or phrase that is no longer appropriate to the context	scale01a
Phonemic Paraphasia	$PPAR	[* p]	Substitution, insertion, deletion, or transposition of phonemes (usually with at least 50% overlap of phonemes between error production and target, but definitions differ); error production may be a word or non-word; error may or may not be self-corrected	ACWT02a kurland19d MSU08b tap11a
Semantic Paraphasia	$SPAR	[* s]	Substitution of a real word for a target word; error may be related or unrelated to the target; error may or may not be self-corrected	adler05a adler05a elman06a kansas10a
Stereotypy	$STE	[* n:k:s]	Repetition of a syllable, word, or phrase frequently throughout the sample; may be words or non-words	scale09a scale27a thompson03a

Sentence-level Feature	CC Code	Notation	Description	Video examples
Agrammatism	$GRA	[+ gram], [* m]	Speech that is reduced in length and/or complexity; function words and morphemes may be missing	agrammatism1 agrammatism2 scale01a tap03a wright205a
Empty Speech	$ES	[+ es]	Speech that contains general, vague, unspecific referents but is semantically and syntactically intact	adler24a elman06a williamson23a

Discourse-level Feature	Description	Video examples
Communication vs. language	Interaction demonstrating successful communication in spite of language filled with neologisms and jargon (Wernicke's aphasia) and very limited language output (Broca's aphasia)	pawleys42 wright201a