Linguistic assessment of Chinese-speaking aphasics: Development of a Cantonese aphasia battery

Abstract

The characteristics of Chinese being a logographic and tonal language has often made it attractive for research. In particular, the right hemisphere has been postulated to be more important in Chinese because of its superiority in prosody and visuo-spatial processing. Literature on Chinese-speaking aphasia is usually single case studies and without a standardised assessment protocol, comparison across studies would be difficult. This study reports the development of a Chinese aphasia test battery with quantitative criteria. It aims at providing clinicians and researchers with guided comprehensive survey of language skills in Chinese (Cantonese). Language performance of 51 Chinese (Cantonese)- speaking aphasic subjects were reported. All of the subjects had aphasias following left hemisphere damage. The classical aphasia patterns of Indo-European language speakers were readily demonstrated in these Chinese-speaking subjects. © 1993.