Agrammatic Aphasia in a Bidialectal/Bilingual Speaker of Caribbean English Creole and Standard English
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The Graduate Center, City University of New York, Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, United States
Agrammatic aphasia is often characterized by the omission, substitution, or misuse of inflectional morphemes and grammatical function words. Cross-linguistic investigation in agrammatism has revealed a particular impairment of verb-tense markers across languages (e.g., Arabatzi & Edwards, 2000; Kolk, 2000; Menn & Obler, 1989; Stavrakaki & Kouvava, 2003; Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2004). However, there is little work on agrammatism in bilinguals or bidialectal speakers (though see Abuom et al., 2011). The potential difference of impairment between languages is particularly challenging to characterize in bilingual speakers whose two languages code structures like verb tense differently.
Bilingualism/bidialectalism in the Anglophone Caribbean is of considerable consequence, as most individuals are early bilinguals, speaking both a variety of Caribbean English Creole (CEC) from birth and having Standard English (SE) as the language of instruction in education. Immigrants from the Anglophone Caribbean to the United States are an ideal population to examine how cross-linguistic influence impacts morphosyntactic construction as the CEC and SE differ in verb tense constructions.
Yet, in bilingual speakers of CEC and English, it is difficult to determine whether grammatical omissions or substitutions function as a valid creole feature or as a sign of agrammatism. Verb tense markers were our focus because, unlike English, CEC lacks bound inflectional morphemes and instead uses pre-verbal markers to indicate tense (e.g., JC: (H)im did cook rice an peas = SAE: He cooked rice and peas; JC: Mi a go shop = SAE: I will go shopping or I’m going shopping.)
The verb production of a 51-year old CEC-speaker with non-fluent left-hemisphere stroke-aphasia who had been in the US for 2 years was compared to that of 20 healthy controls, aged 36 to 54, averaging 12 years since immigration to the US. Morphological omissions or substitutions were compared between groups to determine what patterns of agrammatism are found in CEC-English bilinguals and how these patterns differ from creole production of healthy adult bilingual CEC-English speakers.
Verb forms were tested using an oral sentence repetition task, a verb elicitation task, and a short descriptive narrative. All tasks were conducted twice: once in CEC and, after a break, in SE. Both the control group and the participant with agrammatism exhibited the greatest repetition and verb elicitation errors in the SE past tense condition, where all participants exhibited their highest percentage of errors. The most common error in both patient and controls was a zero-marked verb in place of both past-tense affixation in SE and pre-verbal markers in CEC. For example, a zero-marker error in JC was ‘Mi wash mi han’ for “Mi did wash mi han,’ and in SE was ‘She arrest the t(h)ief that take the jewels’ for ‘She arrested the thief that took the jewels.’ These results are consistent with Jones et al. (2012) on an agrammatic bidialectal speaker of AAVE and SE; it appears that languages themselves have vulnerabilities that can manifest in immigrant speakers of a non-standard language variety and in agrammatism.
References
References
Abuom, T. O., Obler, L. K., & Bastiaanse, R. (2011). Using Swahili and English to test explanations of agrammatism. Aphasiology, 25(5), 559-575.
Arabatzi, M., & Edwards, S. (2000). Functional categories in agrammatic speech. Brain and Language, 74(3), 539-541.
Jones, J., Gitterman, M., and Obler, L. K. (2012) A case study of a bidialectal (African-American vernacular English/Standard American English) speaker with agrammatism. In Gitterman, M. Goral M. and Obler L.K. (Eds.), Aspects of multilingual aphasia, Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 257-274.
Kolk, H. (2000). Canonicity and inflection in agrammatic sentence production. Brain and Language, 74(3), 558-560.
Menn, L., & Obler, L. (1989). Agrammatic Aphasia: a cross-linguistic narrative sourcebook.
Stavrakaki, S., & Kouvava, S. (2003). Functional categories in agrammatism: Evidence from Greek. Brain and Language, 86(1), 129-141.
Wenzlaff, M., & Clahsen, H. (2004). Tense and agreement in German agrammatism. Brain and Language, 89(1), 57-68.
Keywords:
agrammatism,
Caribbean English Creole,
Jamaica,
Verb morphology,
Morphosyntax,
bilingualism
Conference:
Academy of Aphasia 56th Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada, 21 Oct - 23 Oct, 2018.
Presentation Type:
poster presentation
Topic:
Eligible for a student award
Citation:
Malcolm
TR,
Hejazi
Z and
Obler
LK
(2019). Agrammatic Aphasia in a Bidialectal/Bilingual Speaker of Caribbean English Creole and Standard English.
Conference Abstract:
Academy of Aphasia 56th Annual Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2018.228.00040
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Received:
30 Apr 2018;
Published Online:
22 Jan 2019.
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Correspondence:
Ms. Taryn R Malcolm, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, New York City, NY, United States, tarynrmalcolm@gmail.com