Noun and Verb Morphology in Swahili Individuals with Aphasia
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1
Department of Chinese & Bilingual Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, SAR China
Aphasic patients are reported to make errors related to both derivational and inflectional morphology. The kind of errors made by aphasic individuals are reported to highly be influenced by the morphological structure of a given language. Some studies have shown that aphasics vary in their symptoms from depending on their language morphology (Abuom & Bastiaanse, 2013; Bates, Friederici, & Wulfeck, 1987b; Kim, Kim, & Song, 2003; Lind, Moen, & Gram Simonsen, 2007; MacWhinney & Osmán-Sági, 1991; Marková & Cséfalvay, 2010; Pourquié, 2013).These studies, for instance, claim that while agrammatism (reduced grammar) is a defining feature of Broca’s aphasia in languages with poor morphology such as English, substitution errors are common in this group of aphasics in richly inflected languages such as Hungarian, Korean and German. Swahili is a Bantu language known to have agglutinative verbs and a noun class system, making it a language with complex morphology. Regarding the complexity of Swahili, less is known about the morphological mistakes that Swahili aphasic individuals make. This study aims at studying the kind of morphological mistakes aphasics make in producing nouns and verbs. The research will answer questions whether noun and verb morphology are affected differently. It will also shed light on the extent to which nouns from different classes are affected in aphasia. This will be done using object and action naming tasks. As Swahili noun prefixes are part and parcel of a noun, using common object naming tasks might fail to capture the inflectional morphology deficit properly, the use of both real and novel stimuli will be employed. It is expected that the production of the two-word group morphology will be featured by substitution. It is also predicted that in noun inflectional morphology will be unevenly affected. It is further expected that noun and verb deficits are associated in Swahili aphasics. This is because the simplest Swahili verb has at least a verb agreement marker, hence making both verb and noun morphology prone to deficit at the same rate. This study will broaden our understanding of Swahili morphology in relation to aphasia.
Acknowledgements
We would like to extend my gratitude to the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hing Kong Polytechnic University for sponsoring this study.
References
Abuom, T. O., & Bastiaanse, R. (2013). Production and comprehension of reference of time in Swahili–English bilingual agrammatic speakers. Aphasiology, 27(2), 157-177.
Bates, E., Friederici, A., & Wulfeck, B. (1987b). Grammatical morphology in aphasia: Evidence from three languages. Cortex, 23(4), 545-574.
Kim, Y.-J., Kim, H., & Song, H.-K. (2003). Argument structure distribution of predicates in Korean agrammatic speech. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24(3), 343-367.
Lind, M., Moen, I., & Gram Simonsen, H. (2007). Verb and sentence processing in Norwegian aphasic speakers compared to Dutch and English aphasic speakers experimental evidence. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 2007, Vol.21(11-12), p.991-1000, 21(11-12), 991-1000. doi:10.1080/02699200701656538
MacWhinney, B., & Osmán-Sági, J. (1991). Inflectional marking in Hungarian aphasics. Brain and Language, 41(2), 165-183.
Pourquié, M. (2013). Verb processing in Basque and French agrammatic aphasia: A “post-lexical access” deficit. Aphasiology, 27(12), 1472-1510.
Keywords:
Swahili morphology,
Complex morphology,
Noun class system,
swahili aphasia,
Agglutinative language,
Noun and verb morphology
Conference:
Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting, Macau, Macao, SAR China, 27 Oct - 29 Oct, 2019.
Presentation Type:
Platform presentation
Topic:
Eligible for student award
Citation:
Kyando
AJ and
Wang
WS
(2019). Noun and Verb Morphology in Swahili Individuals with Aphasia.
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2019.01.00019
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Received:
06 May 2019;
Published Online:
09 Oct 2019.
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Correspondence:
Ms. Anatoria J Kyando, Department of Chinese & Bilingual Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, SAR China, anatoria5.kyando@connect.polyu.hk