A comparison of coherence in oral discourse between Cantonese speakers in Mainland China with cerebrovascular accident (CVA) and traumatic brain injury (TBI): A pilot study

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event A comparison of coherence in oral discourse between Cantonese speakers in Mainland China with cerebrovascular accident (CVA) and traumatic brain injury (TBI): A pilot study Chloe Cheng1, Anthony Pak Hin Kong2* and Dustin Kai-Yan Lau1 1 The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR China 2 University of Central Florida, United States Background Coherence can reflect the subtle language deficits in individuals with cerebrovascular accident (CVA) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) (Coelho, 1995; Graham, 2007). Global coherence reflects the relationship of the content of an utterance to the general topic of a discourse, while local coherence refers to the conceptual relations between individual utterances and the immediately preceding utterances (Van Leer & Turkstra, 1999). A complete spoken discourse is composed of different events (i.e., the interrelationships between discrete actions and ideas) (Wright et al., 2005). It was suggested that event sequencing and informativeness were correlated with coherence (Andreetta & Marini, 2015; Ulatowska et al., 2013). Individuals with TBI have been consistently reported to be impaired in discourse coherence (e.g., Galetto et al., 2013; Hough & Barrow, 2003), but there are mixed results as to whether coherence deficits are present in CVA speakers (Glosser and Deser, 1990; Wright & Capilouto, 2012). Recently, Chow, Kong, and Lau (2016) reported a significant impairment for both global and local coherence in Cantonese speakers with TBI, as indicated by perceptual ratings by listeners. Similar results have been found for Chinese speakers with CVA (Kong, Linnik, Law, & Shum, 2017). The aim of this pilot study was to examine how global and local coherence, sequence of main events, and informativeness in Cantonese speakers with CVA and TBI differ from non-brain-injured (NBI) speakers. Methods Language samples were collected from four individuals with anomic aphasia (two induced by CVA and another two by TBI) following the Cantonese AphasiaBank protocol (Kong & Law, 2016). Three types of discourse, including picture-description, story-telling, and procedural discourse, were elicited. Control data was collected from four non-brain-injured (NBI) speakers, matched in age and education level with each speaker with aphasia. Global and local coherence were rated on a five-point scale adapted from Van Leer and Turkstra (1999). For sequence of main events and informativeness, each main event and each informative word in the transcript verbatim was evaluated using a 3-point scale and a 4-point scale developed based on the normative data in Cantonese AphasiaBank (Kong & Law, 2016). Results Our preliminary analysis revealed that TBI subjects had lower ratings of both global and local coherence than their corresponding NBI controls. The group difference was higher in global coherence. In contrast, the CVA subjects and their corresponding NBI controls tended to have similar ratings in both global and local coherence. Concerning sequence of main events and informativeness, both CVA and TBI groups showed poorer performance than the NBI groups. These results were consistent with Glosser and Deser’s (1990) findings in which CVA subjects had a relatively preserved communicative functioning on coherence while TBI subjects did not. We proposed that the observed difference in coherence between CVA and TBI subjects could be attributed to the cognition deficits caused by TBI. Further analyses involving more pathological and control subjects are in progress. The impacts of cognitive ability and language impairment, as well as the effect of elicitation tasks (if any), on coherence will be examined. Figure 1 Acknowledgements Special thanks to Dr. Jie Zhu and clinicians in the Speech Therapy Department of the Guangdong Work Injury Rehabilitation Hospital (Guangzhou, China) for their help in subject recruitment and testing.□ References Andreetta, S., & Marini, A. (2015). The effect of lexical deficits on narrative disturbances in fluent aphasia. Aphasiology, 29(6), 705-723. Chow, W., Kong, A., & Lau, K. (2016). An investigation of global and local coherence of spontaneous personal versus descriptive narratives in native Chinese speakers with traumatic brain injury: Preliminary data. Front. Psychol. Conference Abstract: 54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting. doi:10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2016.68.00018 Coelho, C. A. (1995). Discourse production deficits following traumatic brain injury: A critical review of the recent literature. Aphasiology, 9(5), 409-429. Galetto, V., Andreetta, S., Zettin, M., & Marini, A. (2013). Patterns of impairment of narrative language in mild traumatic brain injury. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 26(6), 649-661. Glosser, G., & Deser, T. (1990). Patterns of discourse production among neurological patients with fluent language disorders. Brain and language, 40(1), 67-88. Graham, D. (2007). Beyond the simple sentence level: A case study of a client with high level aphasia. In Byng, S., Duchan, J., & Pound, C. (Eds.), The aphasia therapy file, 2, 59-68. Hove, East Sussex, England: Psychology Press. Hough, M., & Barrow, I. (2003). Descriptive discourse abilities of traumatic brain-injured adults. Aphasiology, 17(2), 183-191. Kong, A. P. H., & Law, S. (2016) Conducting corpus-based analyses of linguistic, acoustic, and co-verbal performances in aphasia using the Cantonese AphasiaBank database. Front. Psychol. Conference Abstract: Academy of Aphasia – 54th Annual Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2016.68.00014 Kong, A.P.H., Linnik, A., Law, S., & Shum, W. (2017). Measuring discourse coherence in anomic aphasia using Rhetorical Structure Theory. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. Epub ahead 17 Mar doi: 10.1080/17549507.2017.1293158 Ulatowska, H. K., Reyes, B., Santos, T. O., Garst, D., Vernon, J., & McArthur, J. (2013). Personal narratives in aphasia: understanding narrative competence. Topics in stroke rehabilitation, 20(1), 36-43. Van Leer, E., & Turkstra, L. (1999). The effect of elicitation task on discourse coherence and cohesion in adolescents with brain injury. Journal of Communication Disorders, 32(5), 327-349. Wright, H., & Capilouto, G. J. (2012). Considering a multi-level approach to understanding maintenance of global coherence in adults with aphasia. Aphasiology, 26(5), 656-672. Wright, H., Capilouto, G., Wagovich, S., Cranfill, T., & Davis, J. (2005). Development and reliability of a quantitative measure of adults' narratives. Aphasiology, 19(3-5), 263-273. Keywords: coherence, discourse analysis, Traumatic brain injury (TBI), Aphasia, Cantonese Conference: Academy of Aphasia 55th Annual Meeting , Baltimore, United States, 5 Nov - 7 Nov, 2017. Presentation Type: poster presentation Topic: Aphasia Citation: Cheng C, Kong A and Lau D (2019). A comparison of coherence in oral discourse between Cantonese speakers in Mainland China with cerebrovascular accident (CVA) and traumatic brain injury (TBI): A pilot study. Conference Abstract: Academy of Aphasia 55th Annual Meeting . doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2017.223.00089 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 14 Apr 2017; Published Online: 25 Jan 2019. * Correspondence: Prof. Anthony Pak Hin Kong, University of Central Florida, Orlando, United States, akong@hku.hk Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. 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