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Aphasiology refers to the study of loss or impairment in language among brain injured patients. The use of SFP (sentence final particles) among Chinese speakers with aphasia is particularly vulnerable. This study aims to systematically investigate the use of SFP in a picture description task among 21 native Cantonese speakers with aphasia and 21 controls. It was found that speakers with aphasia generally used significantly fewer SFP than their normal counterparts. Specifically, subjects in the aphasic group, as compared to controls, tended to produce fewer SFP that indicated time or focus of the speech but more SFP that helped expression of stress or emotional feelings.Keywords: aphasia, SFP (sentence final particles), Cantonese, Chinese IntroductionAphasiology refers to the study of loss or impairment in language among brain injured patients. Speakers with aphasia are often found to be suffering from disturbance of language function in terms of both reception and expression. Depending on its type, aphasia may manifest itself in various ways including difficulties in listening, reading, speaking, and writing.In general, speakers with aphasia are classified into two major groups as fluent or non-fluent. Based on the performance of spontaneous speech, auditory comprehension, repetition, and naming, fluent aphasic speakers are further divided into various types. For example, fluent speakers can be classified as Anomic, Wernicke's, Conduction, or Transcortical Sensory aphasia. In particular, Anomic aphasia is the most common among all aphasic types. Anomic speakers have the most superior language performances among all speakers with aphasia in which some of them may have close to normal oral expression except a various degree of word finding difficulties. Comprehension and repetition of spoken language are preserved. Concerning Wernicke's aphasia, its distinctive feature lies on the emptiness of conversational speech. In most cases, the output contains acceptable grammatical structures, articulation, and prosody except that the output is too excessive such that it lacks of meaningful and substantive words. While individuals with Wernicke's aphasia can speak without effort until they are stopped by others, their naming, comprehension, and repetition of spoken language are disrupted.As for those with Conduction aphasia, the amount of their speech is far less than those of Wernicke's and Anthony Pak-Hin Kong, associate professor, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Central Florida. DA VID PUBLISHING D THE USE OF SENTENCE FINAL PARTICLES IN CANTONESE-SPEAKERS 660contains more pauses and breaks, greatly due to word-finding difficulties. Their auditory comprehension is good but naming and repeating spoken language is impaired. Finally, speakers with Transcortical Sensory aphasia often produce paraphasic and echolalic conversation characterized by incorrect syntactic structures. While the ability to name objects and to comprehend spoken language in these patients is highly defective, the abili...

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Objective: Various methods for the collection of aphasic discourse samples, including single and sequential picture description, storytelling, interactive conversation and monologic recounts, have been reported. The first aim of this study is to examine the cultural appropriateness of the Main Concept Analysis (MCA; Kong, 2009), a discourse analysis developed for Chinese speakers in Hong Kong, for the Irish population. The second aim is to provide preliminary evidence on the clinical applicability of the tool. A case study of using the MCA to assess an Irish-English (IE) speaker with aphasia and a control speaker is presented. Method: Five therapists, who were native IE speakers, were recruited to comment on whether the MCA pictures and scoring criteria were culturally appropriate to the Irish population. The MCA was piloted on six typical native IE speakers and the modified MCA was used to assess one participant with Broca’s aphasia and a matched control to evaluate their performance differences. Main results: The MCA was considered to be culturally appropriate to the Irish population. Preliminary results of the case study indicated that it could differentiate between normal and aphasic discourse production. Conclusion: Future extension should recruit a larger number of participants and should establish reliability and validity of the MCA.