Use of the BAT with a Cantonese-Putonghua speaker with aphasia

    Authors

    A. P. H. Kong;B. S. Weekes

    Comments

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    Abbreviated Journal Title

    Clin. Linguist. Phon.

    Keywords

    aphasia; multilingualism; Bilingual Aphasia Test; language assessment; BILINGUAL APHASIA; CHINESE; Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology; Linguistics; Rehabilitation

    Abstract

    The aim of this article is to illustrate the use of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) with a Cantonese-Putonghua speaker. We describe G, who is a relatively young Chinese bilingual speaker with aphasia. G's communication abilities in his L2, Putonghua, were impaired following brain damage. This impairment caused specific difficulties in communication with his wife, a native Putonghua speaker, and was thus a priority for investigation. Given a paucity of standardised tests of aphasia in Putonghua, our goal was to use the BAT to assess G's impairments in his L2. Results showed that G's performance on the BAT subtests measuring word and sentence comprehension and production was impaired. His pattern of performance on the BAT allowed us to generate hypotheses about his higher-level language impairments in Putonghua, which were subsequently found to be impaired. We argue that the BAT is able to capture the primary language impairments in Chinese-speaking patients with aphasia when Putonghua is the second language. We also suggest some modifications to the BAT for testing Chinese-speaking patients with bilingual aphasia.

    Journal Title

    Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

    Volume

    25

    Issue/Number

    6-7

    Publication Date

    1-1-2011

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    540

    Last Page

    552

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000291661900008

    ISSN

    0269-9206

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