RHDBank English Minga Control Corpus


Melissa Johnson
Communication Sciences and Disorders
Nazareth College

The Brain Injury Clinic (BIC), the source of participants for this corpus, is housed in the York Wellness and Rehabilitation Institute at Nazareth College in Rochester, NY. It is part of the Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) Department, within the School of Health and Human Services. The clinic has been operating since 1992, and has served hundreds of clients from the Greater Rochester community who have acquired brain injuries. Emphasizing a Life Participation Approach to Aphasia (LPAA), we engage clients in meaningful activities to reach their educational, vocational, and recreational potential. The BIC serves as a rich training site for graduate speech-language pathology students and as a research platform to study acquired cognitive-communication disorders.


Jamila Minga
Head and Neck Surgery & Communication Sciences
Duke University

Participants: 23 control participants (data collection ongoing)
Type of Study: various discourse tasks
Location: USA
Media type: video
DOI: doi:10.21415/T5GW24

Browsable Data

Download Transcripts

Media folder

Citation Information

In accordance with TalkBank rules, use of data from any of these RHDBank corpora must be accompanied by this reference:
Minga, J., Johnson, M., Blake, M. L., Fromm, D., & MacWhinney, B. (2021). Making sense of right hemisphere discourse using RHDBank. Topics in Language Disorders, 41(1), 99-122.
Additional citations for individual corpora are available from the contributors’ list below.

Project Description

This corpus consists of movies and transcripts of participants who are serving as controls for people with Right Hemisphere Disorder (RHD) participating in the RHD protocol tasks (https://talkbank.org/rhd/protocol/) in English. The language sample is transcribed and linked line-by-line to the movie. The transcriptions are in CHAT format, allowing the application of any of the CLAN language analysis programs. Demographic and test result data are available from those links at the RHDBank webpage.

Participants are assigned an ID such as nazareth01a. This indicates the corpus (nazareth), the order in which they entered the study (01), and if the protocol was administered multiple times (a = first time, b = second time, etc.).

The RHDBank Discourse Protocol for Control Participants includes the following discourse tasks:

  • Free Speech Samples -- Illness/Injury Story and Coping
  • First Encounter Task
  • Picture Descriptions -- Cookie Theft, Cat Rescue
  • Story Narrative -- Cinderella
  • Procedural Discourse -- Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich
  • Question Production -- Unfamiliar Object Task

    Gem markers include: Speech, Stroke, Illness_or_Injury, Communication, First_Encounter, Question, Sandwich, Cinderella_Intro, Cinderella, Cookie, and Cat.

    The Cognitive Linguistic Quick Test (Helm-Estabrooks, 2001) is also administered in conjunction with the discourse protocol.

    All discourse and testing materials are available from links at the RHDBank website.
    Links to spreadsheets with participants' demographic data and test results are also available there.

    Acknowledgements

    Lillian Jarold and Andrew Yankes reformatted these corpora into accord with current versions of CHAT.