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