Research Meeting: presentation by Jie Fu

Event Date: November 14, 2017
Event Time: 9:00-11:00

A Corpus Study on Metaphor Use in Aphasia

Metaphor plays an intriguing role in clinicians’ interactions with patients and their relatives. Metaphors are crucial in uncovering abstract thoughts people have as well as feelings and relations to others (Gibbs, 2008). Aphasia healthcare is a special therapeutic setting, in which people with aphasia (PWAs) have acquired speech impairment and communication disorders. Even though, metaphor and analogy are still very helpful comparative devices meant to explain something unknown in aphasic context. This research is a corpus-based study that analyzes data from AphasiaBank, which is a shared database of multimedia interactions for the study of communication in aphasia in the corpus TalkBank. It tends to compare metaphor use in conversations between three groups (fluent aphasic, non-fluent aphasic and control). After painstaking investigation, we can find out the characteristics of each group in metaphor production and reveal differences in metaphor use between PWAs and people without any language disorder.

Romy van den Heerik • May 23, 2017


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