Measuring pragmatic competence of discourse output among Chinese-speaking individuals with traumatic brain injury

Anthony Pak-Hin Kong; Dustin Kai-Yan Lau; Daisy Ho-Ying Lai

doi:10.1071/IB23048

RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

Previous Next Contents Vol 24(3)

Measuring pragmatic competence of discourse output among Chinese-speaking individuals with traumatic brain injury

Anthony Pak-Hin Kong

^A ^B ^* , Dustin Kai-Yan Lau ^C and Daisy Ho-Ying Lai ^C

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A Academic Unit of Human Communication, Development, and Information Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

^B The Aphasia Research and Therapy (ART) Laboratory, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

^C Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

^* Correspondence to: akong@hku.hk

Brain Impairment 24(3) 660-678 https://doi.org/10.1017/BrImp.2022.36

Submitted: 27 March 2022 Accepted: 15 December 2022 Published: 5 January 2023

© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Australasian Society for the Study of Brain Impairment. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Objective:

Discourse analysis is one of the clinical methods commonly used to assess the language ability of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). However, the majority of published analytic frameworks are not geared for highlighting the pragmatic aspect of discourse deficits in acquired language disorders, except for those designed for quantifying conversational samples. This study aimed to examine how pragmatic competence is impaired and reflected in spoken monologues in Chinese speakers with TBI.

Methods:

Discourse samples of five tasks (personal narrative, storytelling, procedural, single- and sequential picture description) were elicited from ten TBI survivors and their controls. Each discourse sample was measured using 16 indices (e.g., number of informative words, percentage of local/global coherence errors, repeated words or phrases) that corresponded to the four Gricean maxims. Twenty-five naïve Chinese speakers were also recruited to perform perceptual rating of the quality of all 50 TBI audio files (five discourse samples per TBI participant), in terms of erroneous/inaccurate information, adequacy of amount of information given, as well as degree of organization and clarity.

Results:

The maxim of quantity best predicted TBI’s pragmatic impairments. Naïve listeners’ perception of pragmatics deficits correlated to measures on total and informative words, as well as number and length of terminable units. Clinically, personal narrative and storytelling tasks could better elicit violations in pragmatics.

Conclusion:

Applying Gricean maxims in monologic oral narratives could capture the hallmark underlying pragmatic problems in TBI. This may help provide an additional approach of clinically assessing social communications in and subsequent management of TBI.

Keywords: pragmatics, traumatic brain injury, discourse, Chinese, Gricean maxims.

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