Use of the BAT with a Cantonese–Putonghua speaker with aphasia

Abstract

The aim of this article is to illustrate the use of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) with a Cantonese–Putonghua speaker. We describe G, who is a relatively young Chinese bilingual speaker with aphasia. G's communication abilities in his L2, Putonghua, were impaired following brain damage. This impairment caused specific difficulties in communication with his wife, a native Putonghua speaker, and was thus a priority for investigation. Given a paucity of standardised tests of aphasia in Putonghua, our goal was to use the BAT to assess G's impairments in his L2. Results showed that G's performance on the BAT subtests measuring word and sentence comprehension and production was impaired. His pattern of performance on the BAT allowed us to generate hypotheses about his higher-level language impairments in Putonghua, which were subsequently found to be impaired. We argue that the BAT is able to capture the primary language impairments in Chinese-speaking patients with aphasia when Putonghua is the second language. We also suggest some modifications to the BAT for testing Chinese-speaking patients with bilingual aphasia.

• aphasia
• multilingualism
• Bilingual Aphasia Test
• language assessment

Acknowledgement

We are very grateful to G and his family for the participation in this study and to Elaine Dai who helped with data collection.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

1. The term dialect will be used throughout to refer to different divisions of the Chinese language. The word fangyan (regional tongues) is commonly used to describe different members of the Chinese language. Fangyan has been translated as ‘dialects’ in English. However, it is important to note the term dialect has multiple meanings in English and we use the term to refer to two different divisions of the Chinese language.

2. The terms Mandarin and Putonghua are used interchangeably in the linguistic literature. For the sake of clarity, ‘Putonghua’ is used in this manuscript.

3. Hakka dialect is one of the main subdivisions of the Chinese language spoken predominantly in Southern China and the Hakka people throughout East and Southeast Asia and around the world.

4. Classifier (CL) is an important class of syntactic elements in Chinese that has no counterparts in English. Every noun in Chinese is assigned a specific classifier, whose occurrence is obligatory when the noun phrase contains a numeral, for example, 三本書 /saam1bun2syu1/ three-CL-book ‘three books’, or a demonstrative, for example, 嗰張凳 /go2zoeng1dang3/ that-CL-chair ‘that chair’. The choice of a classifier is not always predictable from the meaning of the noun but is usually chosen to match with its specific semantic feature(s). Apart from the counting and quantifying functions, classifiers also serve grammatical functions indicating possessive construction, for example, 我隻手 /ng3zek3sau2/ I-CL-hand ‘my hand’, and expressing quantification, for example, 個個人 /go3go3jan4/ CL-CL-man ‘everybody’ (Matthews and Yip, 1994).

5. Chinese grammar uses aspect markers (ASP) to mark aspectual relationships, including a change of state (e.g. 跌咗 /dit3zo3/ fall-ASP ‘fell’), a continuing action (e.g. 飲緊 /jam2gan2/ drink-ASP ‘drinking’ and 阻住/zo2zyu6/ block-ASP ‘blocking’), a completed action (e.g. 用晒 /jung6saai3/ use-ASP ‘used’), an occurred event (e.g. 去過 /heoi3gwo3/ go-ASP ‘have been to a place’) and so on.

6. Sentence final particles (SFP), another class of functors that does not have English counterparts, are used extensively in Chinese. Apart from marking questions, they serve various pragmatic functions, such as indicating speech act types or the source of knowledge of the speaker (evidentiality) and expressing the attitude of the speaker towards what they are saying (affirmation, emphasis, exclamation, assertion, agreement and request for confirmation) (Packard, 1990a, b, 1993). Together with the prosody of speech and context, they allow the speaker to relate his or her attitude to the listeners (Kwok, 1984).