With its transparent orthography, Standard Indonesian is spoken by over 160 million inhabitants and is the primary language of instruction in education and the government in Indonesia. An assessment battery of reading and reading-related skills was developed as a starting point for the diagnosis of dyslexia in beginner learners. Founded on the International Dyslexia Association’s definition of dyslexia, the test battery comprises nine empirically motivated reading and reading-related tasks assessing word reading, pseudoword reading, arithmetic, rapid automatized naming, phoneme deletion, forward and backward digit span, verbal fluency, orthographic choice (spelling), and writing. The test was validated by computing the relationships between the outcomes on the reading-skills and reading-related measures by means of correlation and factor analyses. External variables, i.e., school grades and teacher ratings of the reading and learning abilities of individual students, were also utilized to provide evidence of its construct validity. Four variables were found to be significantly related with reading-skill measures: phonological awareness, rapid naming, spelling, and digit span. The current study on reading development in Standard Indonesian confirms findings from other languages with transparent orthographies and suggests a test battery including preliminary norm scores for screening and assessment of elementary school children learning to read Standard Indonesian.

Background: Comprehension of reversible sentences that have derived word order has often been reported as impaired in agrammatic aphasia. Most accounts of this phenomenon refer to the syntactic differences between derived and base word order of the arguments. However, it has been demonstrated that in agrammatic spontaneous speech in standard Indonesian (SI) passives are produced at a rate that is proportional to that of healthy speakers. The main difference between passives in SI and in other languages is the frequency with which passives are used: passives in SI are highly frequent. The high frequency can be explained by the fact that passives are used for politeness reasons, saliency of the passive morphology, earlier acquisition, and formal simplicity of the passive structure. Aims: The purpose of the current study is to investigate comprehension of the passive as a derived structure in SI and the influence of frequency. Methods & Procedures: A sentence-to-picture matching task was developed to test four reversible sentence types (active, passive, subject cleft and object cleft). There are three variables that are of interest, that is, word order, embedding and relative frequency of structures. Eleven agrammatic speakers classified as suffering from Broca's aphasia were tested. Outcomes & Results: The passive sentences were comprehended equally well as the active sentences. Embedding had limited effects: subject clefts were understood as well as actives and passives. Object clefts, however, were understood poorly and significantly worse than the three other sentence types. Conclusions: The sentence comprehension deficit pattern shown in SI individuals with Broca's aphasia introduces frequency of a syntactic structure as an additional factor to consider. Whether frequency or pragmatic constraints protects against erosion of the passive in Broca's aphasia in SI remains an open question.

Although our understanding of reading acquisition has grown, the study of dyslexia in Standard Indonesian (SI) is still in its infancy. A recently developed assessment battery for young readers of SI was used to test the feasibility of Pennington et al.’s (2012) multiple-case approach to dyslexia in the highly transparent orthography of SI. Reading, spelling, phonological skills, and nonverbal IQ were assessed in 285 first, second, and third graders. Deficits in reading-related cognitive skills were classified and regression analyses were conducted to test the fit of single and multiple deficit models. Naming speed (NS) was the main predictor of reading and decoding fluency, followed by phonological awareness (PA), and verbal working memory (VWM). Accounting for 33% of the cases that satisfied both methods of individual prediction (i.e., classification of deficits and regression analysis), the hybrid model proved the best fit. None of the deficits in PA, NS, or VWM alone was sufficient to predict a risk of dyslexia in the present sample, nor was a deficit in PA necessary. Hence, there are multiple pathways to being at risk of dyslexia in SI, some involving single deficits, some multiple deficits, and some without deficits in PA, NS, or VWM.

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Previous studies of multiple languages have found processing differences between patient-first and agent-first word orders. However, the results are inconsistent as they do not identify a specific ERP component as a unique correlate of thematic role processing. Furthermore, these studies generally confound word order with frequency, as patient-first structures tend to be infrequent in the languages that have been investigated. There is evidence that frequency at the sentence level plays a significant role in language processing. To address this potential confounding variable, we will test a language where the non-canonical sentences are more frequent and are comparable to the canonical sentences, namely Standard Indonesian. In this language, there is evidence from acquisition, corpus, and clinical data indicates that the use of passive is frequent and salient. One instance of this difference can be demonstrated by the fact that it has been suggested that frequency may be the reason why Indonesian-speaking aphasic speakers do not have impairments in the comprehension of passives, whereas speakers of other languages with aphasia often do. In the present study, we will test 50 native speakers of Indonesian using 100 sentences (50 active and 50 passive sentences). If the neural correlates of thematic role processing are not observed in the critical region of the sentence (the prefix of the verb), this would suggest that the previous results were indeed influenced by frequency, but if we find that specific ERPs are connected to the hypothesized syntactic operations, this would further reinforce the existing evidence of the increased cognitive load required to process more syntactically complicated sentences.

The current study investigates predictors of reading abilities of adolescents in Standard Indonesian (SI). Reading predictors typically signify, with some degree of error, essential cognitive skills needed for individuals to read effectively. This is crucial since it forms a key part of the initial steps to assess or identify reading-related language impairments such as dyslexia. In addition to measures of reading itself and nonverbal intelligence, the present research examines six empirically motivated potential predictors of reading and decoding: phonological awareness; phonological short-term memory; verbal and semantic fluency; rapid automated naming (RAN); motor control; familial risk; and, self-reported factors. The results show that RAN is a dominant predictor among the other factors that were considered in adolescent SI speakers. The results also show strong support for the notion that the importance of RAN increases as children age. Moreover, it is consistent with previous studies that have argued that RAN is a vital predictor of reading development in transparent orthographies.

Aphasia is a language disorder caused by focal brain injury. The Token Test is a tool to detect aphasic symptoms and measure aphasic severity in individuals who suffer brain damage causing language impairment. While Indonesia has a diagnostic test battery for aphasia (TADIR), it has yet to be able to quantify aphasic severity. In this study, we tested 49 individuals: 26 healthy adults, 7 non-aphasic post-stroke individuals, and 16 aphasic individuals. A series of tests were administered: the TADIR, Token Test, and the Verb and Sentence Test. The Token Test was sensitive enough to distinguish between the three groups and was also correlated with all other language tests including the TADIR.

Research in children with normal language development has shown that there is a certain order in the production and learning of pronominal forms. To one's knowledge, there has yet to be a study on the pronoun development of Indonesian speaking children whose native language do not distinguish between the nominative-accusative form (e.g. in English, I/me -Indonesian, saya/saya) and at the same time being gender neutral (e.g. in English, he/she -Indonesian, dia/dia). The present study follows the personal pronoun development of a (Jakarta) Indonesian-speaking child from 24 months to 46 months of age.Keywords pronoun development, normal child language, early language development, Indonesian language abstrak Penelitian terhadap anak dengan perkembangan bahasa normal telah menunjukkan bahwa ada urutan tertentu dalam pembelajaran dan produksi bentuk-bentuk pronomina. Sepengetahuan penulis, belum ada studi mengenai perkembangan pronomina personal anak berbahasa Indonesia. Bahasa Indonesia tidak membedakan pronomina nominatif dan akusatif (misalnya, dalam bahasa Inggris, I/meBahasa Indonesia, saya/saya) dan pada saat yang bersamaan tidak membedakan jenis kelamin dalam pronomina (misalnya, dalam bahasa Inggris, he/she -Bahasa Indonesia, dia/dia). Studi ini mengikuti perkembangan pronomina personal seorang anak yang berbahasa (Jakarta) Indonesia sejak umur 24 bulan hingga 46 bulan. Kata Kunciperkembangan pronomina, bahasa anak normal, perkembangan bahasa awal, Bahasa Indonesia