Recovery of fluency, MLU and verb production in spontaneous speech of fluent and non-fluent aphasics during the first half year after stroke.

Abstract

Aim: To investigate whether fluent and non‐fluent aphasics differ in the recovery of fluency, MLU and verb production in spontaneous speech during the first half year after stroke; and to explore the general hypothesis that the typology agrammatism-paragrammatism is a useful classification. Method: From two groups; fluent and non‐fluent aphasics, spontaneous speech samples from two weeks and six months after stroke were analyzed by fluency, MLU, Verb Type and Mean Frequency of produced verbs. Results: Results showed a significant difference between fluent and non‐fluent aphasics for fluency, MLU, Verb Type, Type/Token ratio of verbs and the Adjusted Mean Frequency, caused by overall higher scores in the fluent group. Non‐fluent patients improved significantly considering fluency, MLU and Verb Type, which was not the case for fluent patients. Conclusions: The difference in recovery between fluent and non‐fluent aphasics is due to a difference in language disorders after stroke. The findings in this study confirm the usefulness of the classification in agrammatism and paragrammatism.