Discourse Coherence in Adults with Aphasia

Global coherence (GC) reflects how measured units of discourse maintain the overall topic. GC has been measured in participants with aphasia using several measurement methods; however, their psychometric properties have not been systematically examined. The goal of this study was to explore the psychometric properties of three GC measures for external aspects of validity and their reliability over repeated samplings of story-telling. Adults with and without aphasia participated. Preliminary results indicated that correlations among the three GC measures were strong and significant providing evidence of construct validity. Clinical and theoretical implications of the results will be discussed