Sensitivity of macrostructural measures in story narratives to severity of traumatic brain injury among Cantonese speakers in Mainland China
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1
Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, Hong Kong, SAR China
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2
University of Central Florida, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, United States
Background
Individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) can be challenged in producing narratives and affected by deficits in various cognitive ability, including attention, memory, execution functions for planning, and self-monitoring. Impaired narrative production in TBI might be the consequence of impaired global organization of information at the macro-linguistic level of discourse processing rather than at micro-linguistic level (Marini, Zettin, Galetto, 2014). Therefore, some macrostructural measures, including story grammar, global coherence, and thematic unit, had been utilized for discourse analysis in the TBI population. Mixed findings had been yielded regarding the association between these macrostructural measures and cognitive ability in TBI (Marini, Galetto, Zempieri, Vorano, Zettin & Carlomagno, 2011; Marini et al., 2014).
Aim
This study aimed to investigate and compare the correlations of three macrostructural measures (story grammar, global coherence, and thematic unit) and cognitive measures of individuals with TBI.
Methods
Language samples were collected from nine native Cantonese speakers with TBI, who had a post onset time of four months or more. In particular, two stories, including ‘The tortoise and the hare’ and ‘The boy who cried wolf’ adopted from Cantonese AphasiaBank Protocol (Kong & Law, 2018) was used to elicit spoken samples. Orthographic transcriptions were then analyzed using the following three measures:
(1) Story grammar scores, calculated from summation of scores of each episode. Each episode was coded with the seven individual story grammar components (setting, initiating event, internal response, plan, attempt, consequence, reaction) (Stein & Glenn, 1975). Score of each episode was calculated by dividing the number of story grammar components in the episode by 7, which is the maximum number of components in an episode
(2) Global coherence score, i.e., percentage of the number of non-erroneous clause (out of the total number of clauses) (Marini et al., 2011)
(3) Thematic unit score, i.e. percentage of thematic selection (Cheng, Kong & Lau, 2017). Each thematic unit of the story was rated with a 3-point scale, which was evaluated by two criteria: presence and correct order of thematic information. Percentage was calculated by dividing obtained score by the full score of all thematic units of a story.
The cognitive ability of each participant with TBI was evaluated by administering a Cantonese adaptation of the Cognitive Language Quick Test (Helm-Estabrooks, 2011).
To examine the correlations between the macrostructural measures and TBI severity, Pearson correlation coefficients were conducted for the unit-weighted composite score of the five domains tested in CLQT (attention, memory, language, executive function, and visuospatial skill) and each discourse measure.
Result and discussion
The current preliminary results revealed insignificant correlations between the composite CLQT score and each of the three discourse measures. However, when scores of thematic unit and global coherence are combined, a marginally significant positive correlation between the composite CLQT score was observed (p=0.05). Extension of this study by including more participants with TBI is underway.
Acknowledgements
Recruitment and testing of participants with traumatic brain injury was assisted by Dr. Jie Zhu and clinicians in the Speech Therapy Department of the Guangdong Work Injury Rehabilitation Hospital (Guangzhou, China). This study was supported in part by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University 2016 Departmental General Research Funds.
References
Cheng, C., Kong, A.P.H., & Lau, D. K.-Y. (2017). A comparison of coherence in oral discourse between Cantonese speakers in Mainland China with cerebrovascular accident (CVA) and traumatic brain injury (TBI): A pilot study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2017.223.00089
Helm-Estabrooks, N. (2001). Cognitive Linguistic Quick Test: CLQT. PsychCorp.
Kong, A.P.H. & Law, S.P. (2018). Cantonese AphasiaBank: An annotated database of spoken discourse and co-verbal gestures by healthy and language-impaired native Cantonese speakers. Behavior Research Methods. Epub ahead 24 Apr doi: 10.3758/s13428-018-1043-6
Marini, A., Galetto, V., Zampieri, E., Vorano, L., Zettin, M., & Carlomagno, S. (2011). Narrative language in traumatic brain injury. Neuropsychologia, 49(10), 2904-2910.
Marini, A., Zettin, M., & Galetto, V. (2014). Cognitive correlates of narrative impairment in moderate traumatic brain injury. Neuropsychologia, 64, 282-288.
Stein, N. L., & Glenn, C. G. (1975). An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children: A test of a schema. Received from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED121474
Keywords:
Storytelling,
Traumatic Brain Injury,
Cantonese,
macrostructures,
discourse
Conference:
Academy of Aphasia 56th Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada, 21 Oct - 23 Oct, 2018.
Presentation Type:
poster presentation
Topic:
Eligible for a student award
Citation:
Lam
I,
Kong
A and
Lau
K
(2019). Sensitivity of macrostructural measures in story narratives to severity of traumatic brain injury among Cantonese speakers in Mainland China.
Conference Abstract:
Academy of Aphasia 56th Annual Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2018.228.00045
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Received:
29 Apr 2018;
Published Online:
22 Jan 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Prof. Anthony Pak Hin Kong, University of Central Florida, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Orlando, FL, United States, akong@hku.hk