The Use of Sentence Final Particles in Cantonese-Speakers With Aphasia

Abstract

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...