Manifestation of Agrammatism in Hindi-English Bilingual Aphasia
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1
University of Reading, School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, United Kingdom
Introduction: In English, agrammatism is characterised by limited use of morpho-syntactic markers with better use of open class words (OC, nouns, verbs and adjectives) and limited use of closed class words (CC, auxiliaries, articles and inflections, Menn & Obler, 1990). Languages syntactically different from English have shown some similarities with English agrammatic features (e.g., more weighting on OC), but also differences with regard to morpho-syntactic structures (e.g., verb inflections in Hindi represent gender, number and tense, Bhatnagar & Whitaker, 1984). Based on the literature it is difficult to decipher the characteristics of agrammatic manifestations in bilingual individuals with aphasia in both their languages. It is possible that agrammatism would be observed in: a) both languages equally; b) only one language; or c) one language but these deficits are overcome by the availability of another language. This research aims to characterise the features of narrative production of a Hindi-English bilingual with Broca’s aphasia with regard to distribution of different lexical categories.
Participant: RZ, was a 28-year old Hindi-English bilingual who suffered left cerebrovascular accident four years prior to this study. He was working as an engineer and was equally proficient in Hindi and English pre-morbidly. Post-onset he mostly used Hindi for verbal communication and English for telecommunication (i.e., texting). At the time of this research, RZ was undergoing speech therapy in a bilingual environment.
Tasks: A narrative sample was elicited using the Frog story (Mayer, 1969) in Hindi. No explicit instructions were given to restrict language usage as bilingual mode was more naturalistic for him. Using QPA conventions (Berndt et al., 2000), we extracted narrative words from the utterances irrespective of the language (i.e., we counted meaningful words either in Hindi or English).
Results & Discussion: Table 1 shows the number of items across different lexical categories in the two languages. There was significantly higher number of words in Hindi than English; however, this was not uniform across grammatical classes showing noun-verb and OC-CC dissociations. Specifically, he produced fewer nouns, but higher number of verbs (both bare and inflected) in Hindi. Similarly, he produced higher number of CC words than OC words in Hindi; with an opposite pattern in English. For Hindi there was usage of auxiliary verbs and interrogative adverbs (wh-questions), whereas their usage was negligible in English. RZ’s productions showed agrammatic features in both English (i.e., high number of nouns, poor verb inflections) and Hindi (i.e., higher number of verbs, adverbs). In contrast, he was able to inflect verbs in Hindi. This research highlights that for bilinguals it is important to consider communicative success based on the output from both languages. To illustrate, in RZ’s sentence, /bɔj bǝɪṭʰɑ hɛ/ (i.e., /Boy is sitting/), /bɔj/ is English but / bǝɪṭʰɑ hɛ/ is Hindi. When these words were considered together, they convey more meaning than when considered in isolation. One can interpret that RZ was able to overcome his agrammatic features in English using Hindi and vice versa, thus aiding in better and meaningful verbal output.
References
Berndt, R. S., Wayland, S., Rochon, E., Saffran, E., & Schwartz, M. (2000). Quantitative production analysis: A training manual for the analysis of aphasic sentence production. Hove, U.K.: Psychology Press.
Bhatnagar, S.C., & Whitaker, H. A. (1984). Agrammatism on inflectional bound morphemes: a case study of a Hindi-speaking aphasic patient. Cortex, 20, 295-301.
Mayer, M. (1969). Frog, where are you?. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers.
Menn, L., & Obler, L. (1990). Agrammatic aphasia: A cross-language narrative sourcebook. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Keywords:
bilingual aphasia,
agrammatism,
Narrative,
Hindi-English,
lexical categories
Conference:
54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting, Llandudno, United Kingdom, 16 Oct - 18 Oct, 2016.
Presentation Type:
Poster Sessions
Topic:
Academy of Aphasia
Citation:
Balasubramanian
A and
Bose
A
(2016). Manifestation of Agrammatism in Hindi-English Bilingual Aphasia.
Front. Psychol.
Conference Abstract:
54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2016.68.00034
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Received:
21 Apr 2016;
Published Online:
15 Aug 2016.
*
Correspondence:
Miss. Anusha Balasubramanian, University of Reading, School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, Reading, Berkshire, RG6 7BE, United Kingdom, a.balasubramanian@pgr.reading.ac.uk