Another Type of Bilingual Advantage? Tense-Mood-Aspect Frequency, Verb-Form Regularity and Context-Governed Choice in Bilingual vs. Monolingual Spanish Speakers with Agrammatism
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1
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, United States
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2
Nova Southeastern University, Speech-Language Pathology, United States
Introduction:
This study asks whether Spanish-English bilinguals with agrammatism perform better than comparable monolingual Spanish speakers on a test of copular verb production. We chose the Spanish dual-copula system, because its two copula verbs: ser and estar (meaning ‘be’ in English), differ semantically (depending on the context of the sentence), as well as in overall frequency and form-regularity.
We asked: Do bilingual Spanish-English speakers with agrammatism perform differently from their monolingual Spanish counterparts on a test comparing the effects of TMA Frequency, VF Regularity and CGC on verb production?
Methodology:
Participants were asked to complete 130 written sentences orally with the correct verb-form.
E.g., “¿Donde ______ la pelota?” (está)- “Where is the ball?”
Six sentence types were employed to compare among the three factors:
1) High TMA Frequency/Low VF Regularity (ser in present tense)
2) High TMA Frequency/High VF Regularity (estar in present tense)
3) Low TMA Frequency/Low VF Regularity (ser in imperfect past tense)
4) Low TMA Frequency/High VF Regularity (estar in imperfect past tense)
5) High TMA Frequency/High CGC (sentences requiring either ser or
estar in the present tense and result in a semantic change)
6) High TMA Frequency/Low CGC (sentences allowing a choice of either
ser or estar in the present tense and do not result in a semantic change)
Participants:
Six Spanish-speaking participants with agrammatism were tested. Three had been highly proficient bilingual Spanish-English speakers, while the other three were relatively monolingual Spanish speakers. All had suffered left-frontal strokes at least 6 months prior to this study (X= 3.4 years) and were judged agrammatic (in both languages, for bilinguals) based on the effortfulness of their spontaneous speech, short phrase-length, high substantive-word use, omission of functors, and relatively good comprehension. Twelve non-aphasic Spanish-English speakers served as controls, and were matched for language history, age, educational attainment, and relative socio-economic status.
Results and Conclusions:
In general, participants with agrammatism made markedly more errors on this task (X= 40%) than control participants (X= 4%), thus reinforcing our finding that despite high frequency in daily usage, ser and estar are not resistant to agrammatism (O’Connor Wells, 2011; O’Connor, Obler & Goral, 2007).
A mixed-effects logistic regression analysis of the bilingual vs. monolingual data, revealed a trend (p = 0.07) for the mean performance of the bilinguals with agrammatism (65%) to be greater than that of the monolinguals (54%). Although the direction of their performance was the same, the bilinguals with agrammatism outperformed the monolingual ones on all three of our verb factors. These data are consistent with the possibility that bilingualism facilitates language performance among bilinguals in their first language.
Acknowledgements
Dr. Mira Goral, Dr. Ricardo Otheguy, Dr. Jose Centeno, Cara Cohen, Peggy Conner, JungMoon Hyun, Jason Rosas, Dr. Teresa Signorelli, Dr. Jay Verkuilen & the Montefiore Medical Center Speech-Language Pathology Department for their invaluable help with this study.
References
O’Connor Wells, B. (2011). Tense-Mood-Aspect Frequency, Verb-Form Regularity and
Context-Governed Choice in Agrammatism: Evidence from Spanish Ser and
Estar. Doctoral dissertation, City University of New York.
O’Connor, B., Obler, L. K., & Goral, M. (2007). The importance of verb-form
regularity in agrammatism. Brain and Language, 103, 1-2, 29-30.
Keywords:
agrammatism,
bilingualism,
Verb Production,
agrammatic aphasia,
spanish Agrammatism
Conference:
Academy of Aphasia -- 52nd Annual Meeting, Miami, FL, United States, 5 Oct - 7 Oct, 2014.
Presentation Type:
Poster presentation ONLY
Topic:
Not student
Citation:
O'Connor Wells
BA and
Obler
LK
(2014). Another Type of Bilingual Advantage? Tense-Mood-Aspect Frequency, Verb-Form Regularity and Context-Governed Choice in Bilingual vs. Monolingual Spanish Speakers with Agrammatism.
Front. Psychol.
Conference Abstract:
Academy of Aphasia -- 52nd Annual Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2014.64.00060
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Received:
29 Apr 2014;
Published Online:
04 Aug 2014.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Barbara A O'Connor Wells, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, New York, NY, United States, bocslp@gmail.com