On April 14th, TAN Lab research assistant and second-year SLP master’s student, Skylar Jennings, successfully defended her master’s thesis titled “The Relationships Between Single-Word Naming, Discourse Measures and Self-Reported Communicative Effectiveness in People with Aphasia.” This was an intensive project that analyzed the performance of fifteen people with aphasia on the Boston Naming Test (BNT) and several standardized AphasiaBank discourse tasks – including single picture description, picture sequence description, procedural discourse, and story retell. Skylar carefully coded this large dataset for paraphasia prevalence and error type, as well as several discourse-level micro-linguistic and macro-linguistic measures. She then compared these objective measures of communicative effectiveness to participants’ subjective self-ratings on the ACOM.
Congratulations, Skylar, on a job well done, and best of luck during your Clinical Fellowship Year!