AN ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS CONVERSATIONAL SPEECH FLUENCY IN CHILDREN WITH ACQUIRED APHASIA

We report on an instrumental analysis of spontaneous conversational sp eech (SCS) fluency in acquired childhood aphasia (ACA). Tape-recorded SCS samples of 25 children with ACA (clinical judgment: 12 nonfluent a nd 13 fluent), and of 12 dysarthric and 12 nonaphasic and nondysarthri c right hemisphere injured children were analysed in order to: (1) inv estigate whether a more refined analysis can objectively contribute to the differentiation of patients who were labelled as fluent or nonflu ent on the basis of a clinical judgment; (2) verify whether an instrum ental analysis of phonation duration does confirm the subjective estim ation of verbal rate (i.e. the number of words produced in a unit of t ime) in groups of children with acquired neurogenic speech/language di sorders frequently met in clinical practice. The results are: (1) phon ation rate (i.e. the vocalization percentage) seems to represent an ad equate Variable to distinguish clinically diagnosed nonfluent aphasic children from speech/language impaired children belonging to other cli nical groups of acquired neurogenic speech/language disorders; (2) the verbal rate is highly correlated to the phonation rate in all investi gated groups except the dysarthric one. We suggest the instrumental me thod discussed here might contribute to the differential diagnosis bet ween dysarthric and aphasic disturbances in the acute stage of the dis ease. Concerning the study of ACA, the main issue of the present inves tigation is that an objective fluency measurement has succeeded in ide ntifying aphasic children who obviously do not fit in with the standar d doctrine on ACA, which claims that ACA is invariably nonfluent irres pective of lesion location.