Narrative Discourse in Persian-speaking Patients With Multiple Sclerosis

Narrative discourse is a crucial subset of discourse production that can be used to assess high levels of language processing like microlinguistic and macrolinguistic structures. Because patients with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) have more problems at high levels of language processing, this study aims to analyze narrative discourse in MS patients and compare it with healthy people.

This research was a descriptive-analytic study. The study participants included 15 patients with MS and 15 healthy controls matched for age and education level. For investigating the narrative discourse, we used the Persian Narrative Discourse Test (PNDT). Data analysis was performed using descriptive statistics and the independent t-test in SPSS-24.

The mean values of syntactic complexity, verbal error ratio, cohesion ratio, and coherence in Persian-speaking patients with MS were 1.40, 0.42, 1.18, 2.32, respectively. Our findings indicated that regarding the macrolinguistic measures, there is a significant difference between MS patients and healthy subjects (P<0.05). However, there was no significant difference in the microlinguistic measures (P>0.05).

This study showed that narrative discourse analysis could help identify linguistic and communication problems in MS patients. Patients with MS had pragmatic language disorder.