Assesment of communicatıve effectiveness in chronic non-fluent aphasics through Communivative Effectıveness Assesment Tool (IYDA) and Nonverbal Communication Classification ( SOIS)

This study is designed to evaluate communicative effectiveness of individuals with chronic non-fluent aphasia. For this purpose the correlation between Communicative Effectiveness Assessment (IYDA) scores and Language Assessment Tool for Aphasia (ADD) scores and the percentile success in both assessments is evaluated. Other goal of the study is to investigate more to what extend aphasic patients use more nonverbal communication behaviors compared to healthy group.21 patients with aphasia at least six months before the research; and 21 healthy adults matched as closely as possible in terms of age, gender, education.To compare the differences of frequency of nonverbal communication behaviors and function of each behavior in both groups, nonverbal communication classification was used. Nonverbal communicative behaviors were identified in categories (facial movement, head movement, hand/arm movement, prosody, trunk/leg movement, gaze, non speech sound); then, each behavior was coded according to its function (emblem, iconic, deictic, pantomime, adaptors, listen regulator, affect display, beat, ineffective gesture).Although there is a statistically significant correlation (r=0.602) between the scores of ADD and IYDA; aphasics showed better performance in IYDA. The difference success in percentiles between two tests is geared to nonverbal communication. When the differences of frequency of non verbal communication between two groups were compared; aphasics were found to use significantly more total non-verbal communication behaviors, hand /arm movements and head movements. Aphasics were found to use meaningful gestures such as emblem, iconic, deictic, pantomime significantly more than control group. Aphasics were also found out to use ineffective gesture; more frequent than control group. There isn?t any difference in use between the frequencies of affect display, listen regulator and adaptors in two groups. Healthy group were found to use beat more frequently than aphasics.The results of the study are consistent with the idea that aphasics individuals linguistic defisit is not sufficient to predict their communicative competence. These findings indicate chronic non-fluent aphasics use nonverbal communication in natural conversational settings to compensate their verbal defisit.