Interpretation of Fables and Proverbs by African Americans With and Without Aphasia

hanna{at}utdallas.edu

There is a paucity of performance information for African American adults with aphasia on appraisal tasks, especially in comparison with performance by neurologically normal African American adults. We administered language impairment, functional communication, and discourse measures to neurologically normal African American adults and African American adults with aphasia. The neurologically normal group performed significantly better on the language impairment measure (Western Aphasia Battery), the functional communication measure (ASHA Functional Assessment of Communication Skills for Adults), providing the lesson in a fable discourse task, and spontaneous interpretation of proverbs. No significant differences between groups were observed on a picture description fable task or in performance on a multiple-choice proverb task. Few significant relationships were observed among measures in the neurologically normal group; however, the group with aphasia displayed a variety of significant relationships in their performance on the language impairment, functional communication, fable lesson, and interpretation of proverbs tasks. The results imply that fable and proverb discourse tasks may be valuable supplemental measures for characterizing communicative competence in African American adults who have aphasia.

Key Words: African American, aphasia, discourse, fable, proverb

Submitted on March 15, 2000
Accepted on November 9, 2000