Evaluation of the narrative speech in patients with mild cerebral injury

Abstract

In clinical practice there are few test that language therapist can use for the oral speech evaluation. The battery that has been frecuently used for the aphasia assessment, doesn´t usually give us this type of data, and when it happens, it is just a global description of the language of the subject, which doesn't make possible a detailed pursuit of the evolution. The relevance of linguistic production´s assessment becomes more evident in the study of patients with mild injury as well as when patient is in an advanced recovery stage. An assessment without a speech analysis uses to overestimate the subject's capacities and usually ends in an incomplete and inadequate intervention. The aim of the present work was to review different studies that include the narrative speech as part of the assessment, and to explore, with the study of a single case, some applications in this kind of studies for language evaluation in mild brain injury patients.