Assessing Lexical Psycholinguistic Properties in Mandarin Discourse Production by Patients with Aphasia

Due to its high ecological validity, oral discourse production has been increasingly recognized as an important source for assessing language deficits in patients with aphasia (PWA). The present study investigated lexical psycholinguistic properties, such as concreteness, imageability and familiarity, in Mandarin PWA discourse via large-scale psycholinguistic norms. We found that PWA used more concrete, imageable and familiar words than the control group and there were variations among different task types. These findings suggest that psycholinguistic lexical properties need to be incorporated into current aphasia discourse assessment frameworks in addition to lexical variability and grammatical categories.