Oral Presentations

Presentation Type

Presentation

Faculty Mentor’s Full Name

Danielle Fahey

Faculty Mentor’s Department

School of Speech, Language, Hearing, & Occupational Sciences

Abstract / Artist's Statement

In this case study, we examine the cross-language grammatical deficits of a Hindi-English bilingual speaker with chronic aphasia. When aphasia patients are bilingual, they may experience deficits in each language; unique deficits are expected, as no two grammatical structures are exactly the same. So, this case study aims to identify how the overlap of grammars affects the patient’s pattern of grammatical deficits in each language. We recorded the patient’s utterances from samples of their Cinderella story retelling. These utterances were analyzed using the Computerized Language ANalysis (CLAN) paradigm. CLAN is a program that analyzes data for specific language transcriptions. Samples were taken in both Hindi and English and then transcribed using the CHAT method, which is the file format in CLAN. We compared these results to previously coded samples. In particular, utterances in both language samples were coded as agrammatic if grammatical structures were simplified and function words and morphemes were missing. For example, this utterance by the patient was coded as agrammatic: “cinderella and… prince… and… decided elope… and that’s it.” Meanwhile, utterances were coded paragrammatic if grammar misuse was not attributable to an overall reduction of grammatical morphemes or simplification of syntactic structure. The patient produced a higher frequency of utterances and content words in Hindi compared to English. The patient also used the correct Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order more often in the English sample than the correct Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order for Hindi utterances. Limited work on direct grammar comparison has been completed for discourse samples from bilingual aphasia people with this language combination. Thus, this case study aims to contribute towards bilingual aphasia research, especially for Hindi-English language pairs.

Category

Social Sciences

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Apr 19th, 3:45 PM Apr 19th, 4:00 PM

An Examination of Cross-Language Grammatical Deficits in a Bilingual Hindi-English Aphasia Case Study

UC 327

In this case study, we examine the cross-language grammatical deficits of a Hindi-English bilingual speaker with chronic aphasia. When aphasia patients are bilingual, they may experience deficits in each language; unique deficits are expected, as no two grammatical structures are exactly the same. So, this case study aims to identify how the overlap of grammars affects the patient’s pattern of grammatical deficits in each language. We recorded the patient’s utterances from samples of their Cinderella story retelling. These utterances were analyzed using the Computerized Language ANalysis (CLAN) paradigm. CLAN is a program that analyzes data for specific language transcriptions. Samples were taken in both Hindi and English and then transcribed using the CHAT method, which is the file format in CLAN. We compared these results to previously coded samples. In particular, utterances in both language samples were coded as agrammatic if grammatical structures were simplified and function words and morphemes were missing. For example, this utterance by the patient was coded as agrammatic: “cinderella and… prince… and… decided elope… and that’s it.” Meanwhile, utterances were coded paragrammatic if grammar misuse was not attributable to an overall reduction of grammatical morphemes or simplification of syntactic structure. The patient produced a higher frequency of utterances and content words in Hindi compared to English. The patient also used the correct Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order more often in the English sample than the correct Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order for Hindi utterances. Limited work on direct grammar comparison has been completed for discourse samples from bilingual aphasia people with this language combination. Thus, this case study aims to contribute towards bilingual aphasia research, especially for Hindi-English language pairs.