A Cantonese Linguistic Communication Measure for Evaluating Aphasic Narrative Production: Normative and Preliminary Aphasic Data

Abstract

This paper describes the use of a Cantonese linguistic communication measure (CLCM) to quantify narrative production of Cantonese aphasic speakers. Four new pictures containing local characteristics were developed, including revised pictures from the BDAE (Goodglass and Kaplan, 1993), WAB (Kertesz, 1982) and its Cantonese version (Yiu, 1992), and a picture depicting a Chinese restaurant. The development of pictorial stimuli was motivated by the lack of culturally appropriate pictures for eliciting speech from Cantonese speakers. The CLCM contains eight indices reflecting the amount, efficiency, and rate of information conveyed, the grammaticality and extent of elaboration of sentences produced, as well as the degree of error production and lexical diversity in the speech output. Normative data from 30 native Cantonese speakers were collected. Results of preliminary pathological data from 10 Cantonese aphasic patients revealed significant differences between normal and aphasic speakers on most of the indices.