Indonesian Agrammatic Verbal Production:
Semantic and Syntactic Information Competes
to be Produced
Harwintha Y. Anjarningsih, Ratna D. Haryadi-Soebadi,
Abdul Gofir, Roelien Bastiaanse
Introduction
Agrammatic speakers from different languages are known to be
impaired in the production of verbs and verb inflection (Dutch: Bastiaanse &
Jonkers, 1998; English: Saffran et al., 1989; Italian: Miceli et al. 1983, Rossi &
Bastiaanse, 2008). Bastiaanse & Jonkers (1998) and Miceli et al. (1983)
showed that problems in verb retrieval do not always happen alongside
problems in verb inflection: some agrammatic speakers produce a normal
proportion of finite verbs in combination with a low number or a low diversity
of lexical verbs, while some others produce a normal number of verbs with a
normal diversity, but are poor in verb inflection. Earlier work has shown that
reduced verb retrieval in agrammatic spontaneous speech is not related to their
poor performance on action naming (Bastiaanse & Jonkers, 1998; Crepaldi et
al, 2011). Therefore, presuming that agrammatism is a grammatical deficit
(rather than a word retrieval deficit), it seems that the production of lexical
verbs in spontaneous speech is hampered by the need to inflect the verbs for
tense and agreement.
The feature ‘tense’ seems to be particularly susceptible. Tense is used to
mark the time frame in which the event took, is taking, or will take place. This
means that a semantic notion (time) has to be expressed by grammatical
morphology. This operation makes tense difficult for agrammatic speakers
(Bastiaanse, 2008; Burchert et al., 2005; Clahsen & Ali, 2009; Faroqi-Shah &
Dickey, 2009; Lee et al., 2008; Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2004; 2005). In other
words, the spontaneous speech data of Bastiaanse & Jonkers (1998) show that
there is a trade-off between the ability to express the time frame of the event
(tense inflection) by grammatical morphology and the ability to retrieve the
name of the event (the lexical verb): good verb inflection is is combined with
poor verb retrieval and vice versa.
However, we would like to investigate if the production of lexical verbs
in spontaneous speech is indeed hampered by the need to inflect the verbs for
tense and agreement or there is another explanation. To do this, we turned to
Indonesian whose verbs are not inflected for tense and agreement, but verbal
predicates can be modified by aspectual adverbs to specify whether events are
complete, ongoing, beginning to happen, or will happen in the future. The
aspectual adverbs are function words which cannot stand on their own and
must appear with the verbs they modify.
Indonesian does not inflect verbs for tense and agreement. Free-standing
aspectual adverbs are used to express the time frame of the event
grammatically. The question is whether in Indonesian, a language that uses
separate words for the name of the event (the lexical verb) and the time the
event refers to (aspectual adverbs), the relation between verb retrieval and
grammatical morphology to express the time frame also occurs in agrammatic
speech. If so, there should be patients with poor verb retrieval ability and a
normal number of aspectual adverbs and vice versa.
Aim
We investigated (1) whether the production of verbal predicates in Indonesian
is impaired as found in some other languages and (2) whether the diversity of
verbal predicates produced by Indonesian-speaking aphasic participants was
negatively correlated with the number of aspectual adverbs produced with the
verbal predicates. We would like to extend the results of Bastiaanse & Jonkers
(1998) in a language that is typologically different from Dutch.
Methods
We gathered samples of spontaneous speech of 300-words each from six
Indonesian speakers with agrammatic Broca’s aphasia and fifteen non-braindamaged
control participants (NBDs) matched to agrammatic participants
based on age, gender, and educational and professional background. The
diagnosis of Broca’s aphasia was based on assessment using the Tes Afasia
untuk Diagnosis, Informasi, dan Rehabilitasi (TADIR, Dharmaperwira-Prins,
1996) and their agrammatism was assessed in an earlier study (Anjarningsih et
al., subm.). The verbal predicates and the proportion of aspectual adverbs
occurring with the verbal predicates were counted.
Results & Discussions
The agrammatic participants produced verbal predicates (tokens) in the range
of those produced by the NBDs (percentage of verbal predicates from all
predicates, agrammatic participants: 54.5% - 81%, NDBs: 46.3% - 76.2% ).
Below we present the median ranking of the Type Token Ratio of verbal
predicates and the percentage of aspectual adverbs used with verbal predicates
for the six participants with Broca’s aphasia.
To sum up, there are two main results of this investigation:
1. The Indonesian-speaking agrammatic speakers did not have any
problems in producing verbs in their spontaneous speech.
2. There was an inverse relationship between verbal diversity and
percentage of aspectual adverbs used with the verbal predicates.
The first result shows that the problems in producing verbs do not extend to
Indonesian. One possible reason is because producing verbal predicates without
tense and aspectual inflections in Indonesian does not tax the agrammatic
participants’ processing capacities as producing verbs with tense and aspectual
inflections in Dutch, English, German, and Italian. The second result extends
the finding of Bastiaanse & Jonkers (1998) to Indonesian. Integrated with the
Dutch finding from Bastiaanse & Jonkers (1998), this result suggests that
agrammatic speakers have problems in simultaneously giving information
about verbs (semantic/lexical information) and its syntactic time frame.
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