Characteristics of Swahili–English bilingual agrammatic spontaneous speech and the consequences for understanding agrammatic aphasia

A characterization of verb use in Turkish agrammatic narrative speech

“…This characterization seems to be language dependent; for instance, Grodzinksy (1991Grodzinksy ( , 1999 suggests that in languages that allow bare stems, verb inflection is predominantly omitted, whereas in languages where no bare stems are allowed, inflections are substituted. Moreover, Abuom and Bastiaanse (2012) found the latter pattern in their group of Swahili-English agrammatic speakers: in Swahili, an agglutinative language that does not allow bare verb stems, verb inflections were substituted, whereas the same agrammatic speakers omitted the verb inflections when they spoke English. The data in Abuom and Bastiaanse (2012) study are also comparable to Menn and Obler (1990) who propose that the problems of agrammatic speakers with producing correct verb inflections are associated with the extent of the inflectional paradigm of the language.…”

“…Moreover, Abuom and Bastiaanse (2012) found the latter pattern in their group of Swahili-English agrammatic speakers: in Swahili, an agglutinative language that does not allow bare verb stems, verb inflections were substituted, whereas the same agrammatic speakers omitted the verb inflections when they spoke English. The data in Abuom and Bastiaanse (2012) study are also comparable to Menn and Obler (1990) who propose that the problems of agrammatic speakers with producing correct verb inflections are associated with the extent of the inflectional paradigm of the language. According to this account, agrammatic speakers of languages that have a diverse inflectional paradigm are assumed to encounter more difficulties in producing inflected verbs than those speaking languages with a relatively smaller inflectional paradigm.…”

“…To exemplify, Swahili has one morpheme for past tense, whereas English employs numerous ways to form the past tense: three allomorphs -V+t ('he fixed'); V+d: ('he begged'); V+ed ('he created'); and it also has irregular forms ('he stood'). Thus, Abuom and his colleagues report that Swahili-English bilingual agrammatic speakers' greater difficulties with English verb inflection are consistent with Menn and Obler (Abuom & Bastiaanse, 2012, 2013Abuom, Obler, & Bastiaanse, 2011). Alternatively, Goral (2011) attributes problems with verb inflections in agrammatic aphasia to the regularity of the inflectional paradigm.…”

“…There is the cross-linguistic source book from Menn and Obler (1990), but there are also many studies on individual languages (Anjarningsih, Haryadi-Soebadi, Gofir and Bastiaanse (2012) for Indonesian; Bastiaanse and Jonkers (1998) for Dutch; Miceli, Silveri, Romani and Caramazza (1989) for Italian; Saffran, Berndt and Schwartz (1989) for English) and a study on a group of bilingual (Swahili-English) agrammatic speakers (Abuom and Bastiaanse, 2012). All these studies show that the speech of agrammatic speakers is slow and non-fluent, and that their utterances are short and lack grammatical complexity when compared to non-brain-damaged individuals (NBDs).…”

“…For instance, Thompson, Choy, Holland and Cole (2010) studied the narrative speech of English-speaking agrammatic individuals using retellings of a fairy-tale and analysed the whole produced samples. On the other hand, Anjarningsih et al (2012) and Abuom and Bastiaanse (2012) administered interview tasks to Indonesian and SwahiliEnglish agrammatic speakers, respectively, and analysed extracted samples containing a fixed number of words. Moreover, Olness (2006) elicited different discourse types (such as a picture description and storytelling) from a group of English-speaking agrammatic speakers and analysed these discourse types comparatively.…”