An investigation of global and local coherence of spontaneous personal versus descriptive narratives in native Chinese speakers with traumatic brain injury : preliminary data

Abstract

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. 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. Figure 1, please see publisher web.