Noun and verb production of Cantonese normal and aphasic speakers in confrontation naming and oral narratives

Abstract

This study investigated the ability of 19 Cantonese-speaking participants with aphasia and 19 age-, gender- and education level-matched controls to produce nouns and verbs in confrontation naming and oral narrative tasks. Target items were matched for age-of-acquisition and familiarity between word classes and between tasks. The data from the language database developed by Kong, Law and Lee (2009) following AphasiaBank Project was used. In particular, the performance of participants in object and action naming tasks, picture description tasks, procedural description task and story-telling tasks were analyzed. Results showed that there was no clear evidence of word class effect and participants had significantly better word retrieval in the confrontation naming than narrative tasks. The findings reinforce the importance of task effect on word retrieval in aphasia which leads to consideration for using discourse tasks supplementary to confrontation naming task in assessment and treatment.