Coherence in Aphasia : Implementation of Different Measurement Procedures

Coherence is a semantic property of the text to make sense to readers or listeners and is crucial for any text. Various coherence measures have been developed for assessment of discourse abilities in different clinical populations. However, the results of decades of research on coherence of speech of individuals with brain damage have yielded contradictive results. We suggest that this might be due to the different sensitivity of the methods.In this study we two measures of global coherence and five measures of local coherence on the same set of texts by healthy speakers of Russian and people with dynamic aphasia in order to find which methods allow to distinguish between the two groups and how these results correlate. The material for the study is texts from the Russian CliPS corpus which is a collection of oral retellings of the pear film by individuals with brain damage and healthy speakers of Russian language