The comprehension of time
reference in Indonesian Broca’s aphasia: Do lexical adverbs of time present
problems for sentence comprehension?
Harwintha
Y. Anjarningsihab*, Ratna D. Soebadic, Abdul Gofird,
Roelien Bastiaansea
bUniversity of Indonesia
cDr. Soetomo Hospital, East Java, Indonesia
dDr. Sardjito
Hospital, Special Region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Introduction
Recently, some
authors (e.g. Friedmann and Grodzinsky, 1997; Stavrakaki & Kouvava, 2003;
Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2004; and Burchert, Swoboda-Moll, & De Bleser, 2005)
published articles discussing problems in tense inflection faced by agrammatic speakers
speaking different inflectional languages. There is indication that not all
tenses are affected to the same extent. For Dutch, Bastiaanse (2008) found in a
production study that reference to the past was more impaired than reference to
the present when time reference was expressed by finite verbs or participles. Jonkers
& de Bruin (2009) studied the production and comprehension of Dutch verb
inflections referring to past and present. For speakers with agrammatic aphasia,
Jonkers & de Bruin (2009) found that past tense forms were more difficult
to comprehend than present tense forms. Anjarningsih et al. (2009) presented
their results from cross-linguistic experiments with agrammatic/Broca speakers
of Chinese, Turkish, and Bahasa Indonesia. The study found that past aspectual
adverbs in Chinese were also comprehended less successfully than present
aspectual morphemes and also less successfully than future aspectual morphemes.
A similar pattern of impairment was found in Turkish, in that the verb
inflections referring to past were more difficult to comprehend than those
referring to present. For Bahasa Indonesia which expresses time reference by
lexical adverbs of time, Anjarningsih et al. (2009) found that past adverbs of
time were more difficult to comprehend than present and future lexical adverbs.
However, in the Indonesian experiment, the results were still inconclusive
because only two Broca aphasic speakers were tested and one performed not
significantly different from the controls.
The present
study seeks to investigate further how Indonesian speakers with Broca’s aphasia
process lexical adverbs of time. Unlike in Chinese, aspectual morphemes also
exist in Bahasa Indonesia, but they are for describing the inner structure of
actions or events, and only refer to time frames incidentally. The verbs of
Bahasa Indonesia are not inflected for tense, agreement, and person. An example
is given below:
Baru saja dia membaca sebuah surat
Just now he/she read a letter
Aim
The current
study compares the comprehension of past, present, and future markers by
speakers of Bahasa Indonesia with Broca’s aphasia. The questions were:
_______
(1) is
comprehension of lexical time-reference impaired in speakers of Indonesian with
Broca’s aphasia?
(2) if yes, is
the pattern of impairment comparable to that found in Dutch, Chinese, and
Turkish?
(3) is
comperehension of future lexical adverbs less successful than that of present
lexical adverbs as well ?
Methods
The Indonesian
version of the comprehension task of the Test
for Assessment of Reference of Time (TART: Anjarningsih & Bastiaanse, unpubl.)
was used. Photographs of 20 transitive verbs representing (1) actual
performance of the action (present), the completed action (past), and the
intention to perform the action (future) were used. The participants were
presented with two pictures of the same verb in two time frames and had to
match one of them to a spoken sentence. Pictures with targets referring to the past
are never presented on the same page with pictures referring to the future
because both pictures show “no-action”, which has been proven to be difficult
to differentiate for non-brain-damaged subjects. For example, the participants
were presented with two pictures, the first of which depicts “Now the man is
eating an apple” and the second “In a moment the man will eat an apple”. The
experimenter asked the participants to point to “Now the man is eating an
apple” and they had to indicate their choice.
Data of three
speakers with Broca’s aphasia, as determined by the Tes Afasia untuk Diagnosis, Informasi, dan Rehabilitasi (TADIR, Dharmaperwira-Prins,
1996), are presented (P1: male, 55 years old; P2: female, 60 years old; P3:
male, 60 years old). Four non-brain-damaged control participants in the same
age and education range as that of the experimental participants were also
tested.
Results
The
non-brain-damaged participants scored at ceiling and their data will be ignored
in further analysis. For the participants with Broca’s aphasia, the individual
and group results are shown below.
(Consult me at wintha_salyo@yahoo.com for this figure.)
Figure 1. Individual results of the three
Broca participants on the lexical time reference comprehension test and overall
score for the group as a whole.
There is a significant difference between
the performance on past, present, and future (chi2 = 13,54, df=2,
p< .01). For pairwise comparisons between the three time frames and
individual comparisons, two-tailed Fisher’s exact tests were used. For the
group, the past is significantly more difficult than the present (p< .01), and
future (p< .05). The difference between the present and future is not
significant (p>.05).
At the
individual level, the difference between the three time frames is significant
for all participants. (P1, P2 and P3: p <
0.01, p< .05, and p < .05, respectively). However, the past is
significantly different from both present and future only for participants 1
and 3 (all four ps < .01), in that the past is more difficult than present
and future. For participant 2, the past is marginally different from the present
and future (p=.054), but in that present and future are more difficult than the
past. In all three participants, performance on present is not significantly
different from that on future.
Discussion
The results show
that (1) comprehension of lexical adverbs for time-reference in Indonesian Broca’s
aphasia is impaired; (2) at the group level, the pattern of impairment is
comparable to that found in Dutch, past being more difficult to comprehend than
present, and in Chinese, past being more difficult than present and future; (3)
there is no difference between reference to the present and reference to the
future.
As a general
conclusion, there seems to be a difference in the processing of past lexical
adverbs compared to that of present and future lexical adverbs. In 2/3 of the
participants, past is significantly more difficult than present and future and
in the other 1/3, present and future are significantly more difficult than
past.
References
Anjarningsih, H.Y., Bamyaci, E., Hsu, C-J.,
& Bastiaanse, R. (2009) The comprehension of
time reference in
agrammatic aphasia: A comparison of languages with tense and
languages with aspectual
adverbs. A talk presented at the 10th International Science of
Aphasia Conference. Antalya:
Turkey.
Bastiaanse, R. (2008) Production of verbs in base
position by Dutch agrammatic speakers: Inflection versus finiteness. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 21, 104-119.
Burchert, F., Swoboda-Moll, M., & De Bleser, R.
(2005). Tense and agreement dissociations in German agrammatic speakers:
Underspecification vs. hierarchy. Brain
and Language, 94, 188-199.
Dharmaperwira-Prins, R.I.I. (1996) Tes
Afasia untuk Diagnosis, Informasi, dan Rehabilitasi.
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Fakultas Kedokteran Universitas Indonesia.
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pp. 397-425.
Jonkers, R. &
Bruin, A. de (2009) Tense processing in Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia.
Aphasiology, 23:10, 1252-1265.
Stavrakaki, S, & Kouvava, S. (2003).
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Wenzlaff, M., & Clahsen, H. (2004). Tense and agreement in German
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