Introducing the NEURAL Research Lab Data Set for Studies of Discourse and Gesture in Aphasia and Cognitively Healthy Aging Adults.

Purpose: The NEURAL Research Lab data set was collected with the intention of improving the study of short-term variation in spoken language and co-speech gesture in persons with aphasia as well as cognitively healthy adults. The purpose of this short note is to introduce readers to the available data and present two use cases as examples of leveraging the data set.

Method: The final data set will include a minimum of 75 adults with aphasia and 75 cognitively healthy adults, tested across two time points with a short time (about a week) between sessions. The focus was on capturing spoken discourse and manual gesture.

Results: For the purpose of demonstrating the data's potential, we examine two case studies: (a) evaluating test-retest reliability of fluency metrics derived from narrative spoken discourse and (b) characterizing communicative gesture use during spoken discourse.

Conclusions: In this short research note, we methodically introduce a novel open data set, NEURAL-2, available on AphasiaBank, for the examination of naturalistic gesture and speech in persons with and without aphasia. The first example use case analysis provided evidence that persons with mildest aphasia are less fluent than cognitively healthy peers, despite being younger, and that fluency metrics appear to have good test-retest reliability. The second use case showed that gesture rates do not significantly differ between individuals with aphasia and cognitively healthy adults, do not relate to age or cognitive status, and are negatively related to aphasia severity. We intend to validate these analyses in the final large sample. Clinicians and researchers are encouraged to use this data set to improve the understanding of speech, language, and gesture in aphasia and aging.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.30203545.