Micro and Macrostructure Analysis of Narratives in Native and Non-native Speakers of Hebrew With and Without Aphasia

Narratives are investigated for macrostructure (Goals, Attempts, Outcomes) and microstructure
(e.g. lexis, word retrieval, mental state terms, grammaticality of clauses, subordinate and verbbased clauses, fluency markers and codeswitching) in an attempt to distinguish native speakers of
Hebrew from non-natives and speakers with aphasia from matched healthy adults (total n=56, out
of which eight participants were diagnosed with either conduction or anomic aphasia (four native
Hebrew speakers and four non-natives)). All participants told stories based on drawings depicting
theft of a purse. Findings showed similarities between native and non-native participants with and
without aphasia for measures of story-structure, and similarities between the native and nonnative healthy groups for sentence complexity. Differences between healthy speakers and
participants with aphasia were observed for grammaticality, fluency and lexical diversity (e.g.
number of different verbs). Overall fewer mental states types (perceptual state terms,
physiological states, consciousness terms, emotion terms, mental verbs) were used by participants
with aphasia than by healthy participants. We argue for the importance of examining a wide range
of macrostructure and microstructure measures in order to distinguish native and non-native
speakers with aphasia.