Sentence types and complexity of spontaneous discourse productions by Cantonese-speakers with traumatic brain injury– a preliminary report

ABSTRACT

Previous investigations on sentence production in English-speaking individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) have yielded mixed conclusions based on their findings. While some studies found comparable sentence complexity between speakers with TBI and control speakers, others reported more syntactic and lexical errors, reduced sentence complexity, and erroneous word order transpositions in the sentence production of speakers with TBI. These contradictory findings could possibly be due to the use of language measures that were less sensitive to subtle syntactic impairments among speakers with TBI. In this preliminary report, the language samples obtained from 11 Cantonese-speaking participants with mild-moderate TBI in Guangzhou, with a mean age of 37.6 and mean years of education of 10 years, and nine control speakers with a similar age range and education background were analyzed using in-depth linguistic-oriented frameworks adopted from pervious works in Cantonese. The results indicated that the TBI group produced more errors, different varieties of sentence types, and lower syntactic complexity in their sentence production compared with the control group. The findings suggested that the more refined and linguistic-oriented measures used in the present study were more sensitive in identifying the subtle syntactic impairments produced by the participants with TBI.

KEYWORDS:

• Syntax
• sentence complexity
• traumatic brain injury
• Chinese

Acknowledgments

The author would like to express the gratitude 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. Last but not least, acknowledgment is also given to all the participants, who were willing to spend hours of time for the study without any monetary compensation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

This study involving human participants was reviewed and approved by the Human Subjects Ethics Sub-committee of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HSEARS20150728001). The patients/participants provided written informed consent to participate in this study.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ According to Renkema (2004), cohesion is defined as the connection that exists between elements within a text. Cohesion can be achieved by means of repeating specific elements of the text (such as recurrence or paraphrase) or through the use of ellipsis or cohesive devices (such as morphological and syntactic devices) to express relationships of connection or tense (Bussmann, 1996).

² All examples used to represent different grammatical structures of Cantonese were extracted from the language samples collected in the current study to better illustrate the sentences produced by the participants in this study. Phonetic transcriptions of the examples are represented in IPA format.:

³ Based on the number of participants that were suitable for inclusion as of August 2017, the time this investigation was conducted. This final sample size was comparable to related reported studies of Chinese-speaking individuals with TBI (e.g., Kong et al., 2020) and aphasia (e.g., Kong & Law, 2009; Kong et al., 2014; Law et al., 2015).

⁴ Specifically, with reference to the Cantonese AphasiaBank elicitation protocol (Kong & Law, 2019; Kong et al., 2015), the personal narratives collected using the monologue of telling one’s TBI experience was a replacement of the original “stroke story” (which only applied to stroke survivors).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Departmental GRF of Hong Kong Polytechnic University [4-ZZFP].