An investigation of global and local coherence of spontaneous personal versus descriptive narratives in native Chinese speakers with traumatic brain injury: Preliminary data
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1
The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR China
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2
University of Central Florida, United States
Background
Examination of communication skills among individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) should include assessment at the discourse level. This is because their language impairment are typically not identified through conventional language evaluations and they exhibited more subtle linguistic deficits that are not revealed by traditional aphasia assessment batteries.
Coherence refers to the appropriate maintenance of some aspect of a designated topic within a discourse. While local coherence is related to the relationship of meanings or contents of a verbalization to the preceding utterance produced, global coherence reflects how well each sentence of a sample relates to the overall theme of a conversational topic (Hough & Barrow, 2003). Very limited information is available in the TBI discourse literature relative to whether and how the degree of coherence in spontaneous output is affected by task. Among the few examinations published, a better coherence in a personal narration (as compared to current event narration) has been reported (van Leer & Turkstra, 1999), possibly because talking about personal experience required less organizational demand than the current event narration. Furthermore, difference in coherence was found to be absent between discourse topics of family and work narrations (Hough & Barrow, 2003).
Aims
First, motivated by the difference in communication style between eastern and western cultures (Hall, 2000), in which eastern dialogues tend to be high context with more statements containing implicit meanings, and vice versa for western dialogues (low context with more statements containing explicit meanings), we examined if global and local coherence of Chinese TBI discourse differs. Second, given that using pictures in descriptive narratives can provide more visual and cognitive supports for output but personal narratives will require spontaneous production on the part of user, we investigated if TBI speakers demonstrated greater difficulty in maintaining global coherence in the personal than descriptive narrations.
Methods
Language samples were collected from two Cantonese-speaking and three Mandarin-speaking clients with TBI using the Chinese AphasiaBank protocol (see Kong et al., 2015) modified for TBI. Orthographic transcriptions of four tasks (personal narration of own TBI story and an important event as well as description of the “Cat rescue” and “Broken window” pictures) were used. Each utterance was assigned a rating for both global and local coherence using a 5-point scale (Glosser & Deser, 1991). In particular, for global coherence, “5” would indicate the best relation of meanings or contents of the utterance to the general topic; as for local coherence, “5” would reflect the best relation of meanings or contents of the utterance to that of the preceding utterance through the relationship of continuation, elaboration, repetition, coordination or subordination with the topic of the preceding utterance.
Results and Discussion
Ratings of local coherence was higher than global coherence, regardless of the narrative types. Personal narratives yielded lower coherence ratings than the descriptive narratives (Table 2). These results can possibly be related to the prediction that eastern narratives contain less explicit statements. Further extension will involve analyses with more subjects and comparison between TBI and control speakers.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Dr. Jie Zhu and clinicians in the Speech Therapy Department of the Guangdong Work Injury Rehabilitation Hospital (Guangzhou, China) for their help in subject recruitment and testing.
References
Glosser, G., & Deser, T. (1991). Patterns of discourse production among neurological patients with fluent language disorders. Brain and Language, 40(1), 67-88.
Hough, M., & Barrow, I. (2003). Descriptive discourse abilities of traumatic brain-injured adults. Aphasiology, 17(2),183-191.
Kong, A. P. H., Law, S. P., Kwan, C. C. Y., Lai, C., & Lam, V. (2015) A coding system with independent annotations of gesture forms and functions during verbal communication: Development of a database of speech and GEsture (DoSaGE). Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 39(1), 93-111.
van Leer, E., & Turkstra, L. (1999). The effect of elicitation task on discourse coherence and cohesion in adolescents with brain injury. Journal of Communication Disorders, 32(5), 327-349.
Keywords:
discourse,
TBI,
Mandarin Chinese,
coherence analysis,
Cantonese AphasiaBank
Conference:
54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting, Llandudno, United Kingdom, 16 Oct - 18 Oct, 2016.
Presentation Type:
Poster Sessions
Topic:
Student Submissions
Citation:
Chow
W,
Kong
A and
Lau
K
(2016). An investigation of global and local coherence of spontaneous personal versus descriptive narratives in native Chinese speakers with traumatic brain injury: Preliminary data.
Front. Psychol.
Conference Abstract:
54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2016.68.00018
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Received:
17 Apr 2016;
Published Online:
15 Aug 2016.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Anthony Pak Hin Kong, University of Central Florida, Orlando, United States, akong@hku.hk