Establishing Norms of Connected Speech Measures for Story‐Telling in Cantonese‐Speaking Adults

What is already known on this subject Discourse analysis is a critical part of evaluating and understanding a person's communication abilities. Studies indicated that narrative discourse is more sensitive to specific linguistic parameters than other genres, and people with stronger narrative skills tended to have more social communication opportunities. An increasing number of studies had been working on setting norms for discourse tasks. Locally, Kong et al. (2025) have recently reported the normative references for descriptive tasks of the Cantonese AphasiaBank. What this study adds to the existing knowledge First, this study completed the norms establishment for all discourse tasks of the Cantonese AphasiaBank. Second, our analysis of the impact of different factors on narrative discourse offers significant value for clinical applications. We found that ageing was not manifested across all microstructural linguistics consistently, while lexical diversity was found to be tolerant to ageing. However, ageing was found to be adversely affecting propositional parameters and discourse informativeness. What are the clinical implications of this study? Narrative discourse, being one of the most popular tasks in clinical assessment but often faced the challenges of a lack of objective references. This study analysed two well-familiarized narrative stories, provides a complete set of norm data readily for front line clinicians and researchers, which could be used for intervention planning, monitoring progress (e.g., used them as control probes for tracking generalization effects) or as an input for investigating the interplay between linguistics and cognitive abilities.