Sabtu, 01 Desember 2012

PhD Plan


Apr 19, '09 10:03 AM
for everyone

This is what I will do for the first year of my stay here in Groningen

Comprehension and Production of Time Reference in Indonesian
by Speakers with Aphasia

The project centers on research to investigate the comprehension and production of time reference by speakers of Indonesian who suffer from aphasia. More specifically, the project wants to see whether the adverbs that denote time reference in Indonesian (which is typologically classified as an analytic language) are processed in a way comparable to that of inflections for tense and aspect. Interest on this topic is motivated by findings from Dutch and Turkish that show that the time denoted by tense and aspect (past, present, future) seems to influence the production and comprehension of inflections (e.g. for Dutch Jonkers and de Bruin, 200 and Bastiaanse, 2008; for Turkish Yarbay Duman and Bastiaanse, 2009). Two groups of speakers of aphasia will participate in the research: agrammatic or non-fluent speakers and fluent speakers. This will enable drawing a comparison between the two groups which are traditionally differentiated based on the production-comprehension characteristics. Roughly speaking, grammatic speakers are said to be impaired in production but have intact comprehension and vice versa for the fluent speakers with aphasia. It will be seen whether the production and comprehension of the adverbs denoting time reference in Indonesian are markedly different or not between the two groups.

Two groups of adverbs will be used in the project. Temporal or lexical adverbs, such as kemarin “yesterday” and aspectual adverbs, such as sudah “already,” will be used in both the production and comprehension tests. The two kinds of adverbs differ in their syntactic property in that the former’s scope is sentential and the latter’s is a part of the Verb Phrase (VP) (Butar-Butar, 1976). Their semantic property also differs as the former kind of adverbs is classified as nouns and the latter as adverbs (Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia, 2005). To support the expected findings from the aphasia tests, an ERP (Event-Related Potentials) experiment will be conducted with Indonesian speakers without any history of neurological disease to establish that the two kinds of adverbs are indeed processed differently.

For the aphasia experiment, besides the data obtained from testing, this project will also collect some spontaneous speech data that will be analyzed for other linguistic aspects besides adverbs denoting time reference. Together with the data from tests, these spontaneous speech data can provide some glimpse on how aphasia influences the production of Indonesian, which is very different from the inflectional languages that have been extensively described in the literature.

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