Table 6.

Current Major Findings of Investigations Using Cantonese AphasiaBank

Aspects of verbal and non-verbal communication	Materials used	Major findings
Lexical processing	Connected speech (3 tasks), noun and verb naming of 19 anomic PWA and controls	With balanced age-of-acquisition, familiarity and imageability, word retrieval accuracy was higher in picture naming than connected speech, but PWA did not retrieve nouns better than verbs (Law, Kong, Lai, & Lai, 2015).
	Connected speech (1 task) of 65 fluent PWA and controls	Analyses of vocabulary use in terms of part-of-speech, word frequency, lexical semantics, and diversity were conducted. It was found that the vocabulary size was larger for controls than that of PWA, but the distribution across parts-of-speech, frequency of occurrence, and the ratio of concrete to abstract items in major open word classes was similar for both speaker groups. In addition, the two groups proportionately used more different verbs than nouns. (Law, Kong, Lai, & Lai, 2017).
Micro-linguistic performance	Connected speech (3 tasks) of 144 unimpaired speakers	Genre types (i.e., structure and style) and planning load influenced the rate of occurrence of right dislocation, a focus marking device that carried an affective function motivated by limited planning time in conversation (Lai, Law, & Kong, 2017).
	Connected speech (3 tasks) of 131 unimpaired speakers and 48 PWA	PWA were impaired in various aspects of micro-linguistic skills, including reduced type-token ratio, lower percentage of simple or complete sentences, higher percentage of regulators and dysfluency (Kong, Law, Kwan, Lai, & Lam, 2015; Kong, Law, Wat, & Lai, 2015).
Co-verbal gestures		PWA employed significantly more gestures than controls. Gesture use was influenced by aphasia severity, semantic integrity, and linguistic competence (Kong, Law, Wat, & Lai, 2015).
	Connected speech (3 tasks) of 23 fluent PWA, 21 non-fluent PWA, and 23 controls	Different patterns of using non-verbal behaviors were observed between the two PWA groups (Kong, Law, & Chak, 2015, 2017).
Non-verbal behaviors	Connected speech (2 tasks) of 2 fluent PWA, 2 non-fluent PWA, and controls	Frequency of employing referent-related gestures, functional gestures, facial expressions, and adaptors in PWA was over double than controls. Fluent and non-fluent PWA differed qualitatively in using these non-verbal behaviors (Kong, Law, & Lee, 2010).
Macro-linguistic performance	Connected speech (2 tasks) of 15 anomic PWA and controls	PWA were reduced in information content and elaboration with simplified/impaired discourse structures. Their macro-linguistic deficits were evidenced by impaired cohesion and coherence (Kong, Linnik, Law, & Shum, 2014, 2017).
	Connected speech (1 task) of 65 fluent PWA and controls	When engaged in a monologue of telling an important event of the life, there was a significant overlap in the topics between the two speaker groups (Law, Kong, Lai, & Lai, 2017).
Speech prosody	All narrative tasks from 17 fluent PWA and controls	PWA were impaired in prosody that contained significantly more sentences with rising intonation (more noticeable for shorter sentences) (Lee, Lam, Kong, & Law, 2015). PWA’s syllable duration was significantly longer with more inappropriate speech pauses (Lee, Kong, Chan, & Wang, 2013). The durations of content versus function words in oral discourse were also different (Lee, Kong, & Wang, 2014).

Note: PWA = Persons with aphasia.