An analysis of topics and vocabulary in Chinese oral narratives by normal speakers and speakers with fluent aphasia

ABSTRACT

This study analysed the topic and vocabulary of Chinese speakers based on language samples of personal recounts in a large spoken Chinese database recently made available in the public domain, i.e. Cantonese AphasiaBank (http://www.speech.hku.hk/caphbank/search/). The goal of the analysis is to offer clinicians a rich source for selecting ecologically valid training materials for rehabilitating Chinese-speaking people with aphasia (PWA) in the design and planning of culturally and linguistically appropriate treatments. Discourse production of 65 Chinese-speaking PWA of fluent types (henceforth, PWFA) and their non-aphasic controls narrating an important event in their life were extracted from Cantonese AphasiaBank. Analyses of topics and vocabularies in terms of part-of-speech, word frequency, lexical semantics, and diversity were conducted. There was significant overlap in topics between the two groups. While the vocabulary was larger for controls than that of PWFA as expected, they were similar in distribution across parts-of-speech, frequency of occurrence, and the ratio of concrete to abstract items in major open word classes. Moreover, proportionately more different verbs than nouns were employed at the individual level for both speaker groups. The findings provide important implications for guiding directions of aphasia rehabilitation not only of fluent but also non-fluent Chinese aphasic speakers.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese fluent aphasia
• connected speech
• vocabulary
• topics
• language rehabilitation

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the staff members in the following organisations (in alphabetical order) for their help in subject recruitment: Christian Family Service Centre (Kwun Tong Community Rehabilitation Day Centre), Community Rehabilitation Network of The Hong Kong Society for Rehabilitation, Internal Aphasia Clinic at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Stroke Association, Lee Quo Wei Day Rehabilitation and Care Centre of The Hong Kong Society for Rehabilitation, Queen Mary Hospital, and Self Help Group for the Brain Damage. We are also grateful to all participants for taking part in the study.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Funding

This study is supported by a grant funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH-R01-DC010398).

Additional information

Funding

This study is supported by a grant funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH-R01-DC010398).