Unveiling the complexity of impaired language and cognition: Highlights from Cantonese AphasiaBank and Chinese TBI Bank

Abstract

<p>The Cantonese AphasiaBank Database (https://speech.edu.hku.hk/caphbank/search/), funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is an initiative aimed at providing access to behavioral data from open-ended spoken discourse tasks (including four different discourse genres: personal narratives, picture descriptions, story retelling, and procedural discourse) performed by native Cantonese speakers with aphasia and healthy controls residing in Hong Kong (Kong & Law, 2019). It serves as a valuable resource for researchers, clinicians, and university educators. The database contains extensive linguistic, gestural, and prosodic data collected from both healthy Cantonese speakers and individuals with language deficits resulting from left hemisphere stroke. A Chinese Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) Bank has later been developed; it includes the same oral discourse tasks performed by native Putonghua and Cantonese speakers with TBI and stroke residing in Mainland China (Kong & Lau, 2020). With reference to these two databases, various investigations have been conducted to enhance our understanding of clinical topics, such as the analysis of neurogenic discourse production, cognitive demands of different narrative tasks, the impact of co-verbal gestures on language production, and automatic speech recognition of disordered spoken discourse. This presentation will showcase key research findings and their implications for the assessment and rehabilitation of Chinese-speaking individuals with aphasia and related neurogenic communication disorders.</p>