An individual’s language biography as a tool for modeling the mental lexicon (based on experimental work with patients with aphasia)

Abstract

The article considers the relationship between the language biography of a patient with aphasia and the process of her speech rehabilitation. The research project focuses on the problem of predicting the structure of mental lexicon in patients with aphasia via modeling it in native speakers from the same socio-professional groups without speech disorders. The process is largely based on knowledge about common characteristics of their language biography. The aim of the article is to feature the methodology used in such a type of predictive modeling, its theoretical foundations and main advantages for speech rehabilitation work. The research data include: statistics about sociological characteristics of patients collected at the local Neurorehabilitation Center from 2014 to 2018; 18 questionnaires filled in by the relatives of the patients in question; interviews with healthy Russian native speakers, whose socio-professional characteristics are similar to characteristics of one of the target groups of the patients; 12 hours of audio recordings of interviews with healthy native speakers of the Russian language, whose language biography, gender and age characteristics are similar to those of the target groups of the patients; a corpus of interview scripts processed with the Sketch Engine corpus manager; 14 patients’ speech assessment sheets completed in accordance with the Wasserman scale (it is designed to determine speech disorders of patients with a local cerebrovascular accident). By using an interdisciplinary complex of methods we obtained the following results: completed a sociolinguistic portrait of people at risk of aphasia with similar language biographies; listed the most frequent words, collocations and automated verbal series (phrases and sayings) specific to people at risk of aphasia; identified the language biography features that affect mental lexicon; elaborated a complex of exercises for speech rehabilitation of patients with aphasia regarding the specificity of their language biography; validated and assessed the exercises’ effectiveness in clinical practice. Our main conclusion is that the proposed method can help to design for patients with aphasia a more personalized complex of speech recovery exercises that will be adapted to their language biography