Table 1.
Description of discursive variables.
| Discursive Variable | Definition |
|---|---|
| Speech rate and speech sound errors | |
| Number of words | Total number of words produced. Contractions were considered as one word. False starts, repaired sequences, and filled pauses (see “other disruptions of fluency”) were not included in word counting |
| Speech production rate | Total number of words/duration of the sample without pauses |
| Phonological paraphasias phw | (Total number of phonological paraphasias/number of words) × 100 |
| Distortions phw | (Number of distortions/number of words) × 100 |
| Other disruptions to fluency | |
| False starts phw | Single words that are abandoned after some phonemes are produced. (Total number of false starts/number of words) × 100 |
| Repaired sequences phw | Complete words (or a single complete word) that are reworked. (Total number of repaired sequences/number of words) × 100 |
| Filled pauses phw | Examples of filled pauses are “hmmm” and “aah” (in Portuguese: “hum” and “é”). (Total number of filled pauses/number of words) × 100 |
| Incomplete sentences phw | Sentences abandoned (and not repaired) and sentences missing obligatory elements (a verb and its obligatory arguments). (Total number of sentences abandoned/number of words) × 100 |
| Lexical-semantic level | |
| Open-class proportion | Verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs ending in -ly (in Portuguese: -mente) were considered open-class words. Light verbs (verbs with little semantic content), conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns were counted as closed-class words. Open-class words/closed-class words |
| Verb proportion | Verbs/verbs + nouns |
| Lexical-semantic errors phw | (Semantic paraphasias, paraphrases, and word-finding difficulties/number of words) × 100 |
| % CIU | Correct information units (CIU) are words that are relevant to the context (the picture) and informative. Total number of correct information units/total number of words produced |
| Syntactic structure and complexity | |
| Number of utterances | Total number of utterances |
| Number of sentences | Total number of complete sentences, i.e., a sentence with at least a verb and its obligatory arguments |
| Morphosyntactic errors phw | (Total number of ungrammatical sentences, inflectional errors, and absence of determiners/number of words) × 100 |
| Embeddings phw | (Total number of sentences embedded within another sentence/number of words) × 100 |
| Mean length of sentences | Total number of words in sentences/total number of sentences |
| Proportion of sentences | Total number of complete sentences/total number of utterances |
| Syntax production rate | Total number of words in sentences/total number of words |
Abbreviation: CIU = correct information units; phw = per hundred words.