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Assigning Linguistic Roles:
Sentence Interpretation in Normal and Aphasic
Kannada-English Bilinguals
Jyotsna
Shyamala
Vaid
Department of Psychoiogq
Texas A & M University
Chengappa
Department of Speech Pathology
All India Institute of Speech
and Hearing
ABSTRACT
In interpreting a sentence, listeners rely on a variety of linguistic cues to assign
grammatical roles such as agent and patient. In normal sentence comprehension these
cues converge to enable sentence interpretation,
yet when the cues are placed in
competttion they are differentially used by speakers. The present study investigated
the relative strength of three cues to agenthood - word order, noun animacy and
subject-verb agreement - in normal and aphasic Kannada-English
bilinguals and
Kannada monolingual controls. The findings are discussed with respect to other crosslinguistic evidence using the sentence interpretation paradigm and with respect to their
bearing on theories of bilingual language representation.
In interpreting
a sentence we rely on a variety of surface linguistic cues ranging
from phonological
stress, morphological
markers and syntactic-semantic
cues
such as word order and noun animacy. The information
conveyed by these cues
allows us to identify the topic of a sentence, to distinguish between given and new
information
and to assign grammatical
roles. In acquiring a first or a second
language, a language user must learn what kinds of information
are conveyed by
particular linguistic cues present in the surface form.
The mapping between form and function is rarely one-to-one for a single form
can map to several functions and several forms can map to the same function. For
example, in English, cues such as word order, pronoun case inflection and noun
animacy all convey information
about grammatical roles. Although more than one
162
Journal of Neurolinguistics,
cue conveys information
Volume 3, Number 2 (1988)
relevant to the same comprehension
in how well they convey this information.
The accuracy
process, the cues vary
with which a cue conveys
information
is known as its validit),. Cue validity may be viewed as the product ofa
cue’s availability
and reliability. Availability
is a measure of how often a cue is
present, reliability is a measure of how often a cue points to the correct interpretation when it is present. Cue validity can be calculated from adult language input
to the language learner (cf. McDonald
1984). While overall cue validity predicts
order of acquisition,
conflict validity (see McDonald
1987) predicts order of adult
strength of usage.
COMPETITION
MODEL
The concept
of cue validity
has been incorporated
into a model
of sentence
comprehension
developed by Bates and MacWhinney
(1982. 1987). This model,
known as the Competition
Model. offers a probabilistic
account of how cues
combine during comprehension.
ln this model. each cue is accorded a strength or
weighting
proportional
to its validity. This weighting in turn determines
the
amount of activation
of a particular
interpretation.
If two cues agree as to an
interpretation,
their strengths are added, leading to a greater activation
of that
interpretation
compared to when a single cue is present. If they disagree. the
interpretation
with the highest activation
level is chosen. In this way, cues are
thought to cooperate and compete in the comprehension
process.
SENTENCE
INTERPRETATION
The notion
of cue validity
been empirically
examined
PARADIGM
and its psychological
by MacWhinney
counterpart
cue strength
et al. (1984) in cross-linguistic
has
studies
of sentence processing. The basic paradigm in this research involves a sentence
interpretation
task where native speakers of different languages are presented with
simple, transitive sentences containing
two concrete nouns and a concrete action
verb and are asked to identify the agent - that is, who performed the action
described in the sentence. While in normal discourse various cues arecorrelated,
in
the sentence interpretation
paradigm the sentences always represent orthogonal
combinations
of lexical-semantic,
pragmatic, grammatical
and/ or phonological
cues, thereby allowing for an independent
examination
of the relative contribution
of each of these types of information.
The result of selecting sentences in this way is
that a number of semi-grammatical
sentences are included along with grammatical
sentences. Nevertheless.
their syntactic or semantic oddness does not appear to
affect how they are processed as previous research with this paradigm has shown.
Bilingual Sentence Interpretation
For example,
the obligatory
Hungarian
speakers
case markings
comprehend
ungrammatical
have been deleted
sentences
163
in which
in the same way in which they
process grammatical
sentences where the omission of this case marking is allowable
(MacWhinney
et al. 1985).
In some of the sentences in this task the various cues converge to a single decision
about who did the action while in other sentences one or all of the cues may conflict.
An example where the cues of word order, subject-verb
agreement and noun
animacy conflict is in the sentence “The dog lick the pencils”. Standard subject- verb ~ object (SVO) word order in English would assign the preverbal noun dog
as actor as would the animacy cue, but noun-verb
agreement would favor the plural
noun pencils, which agrees in number with the plural verb form. In such cases
native speakers of English rely most on word order, discardingpencils
as the actor
despite the agreement cue. Italian speakers, however, tend to choosepencils as the
agent, for agreement
cues are stronger than word order cues in Italian. For
German speakers, animacy and agreement turn out to be stronger cues than word
order and for Hungarian
and Serbo-Croation
speakers case is a stronger cue than
word order. In short, adult native speakers interpret sentences by making preferential use of the cue that is the most valid (or informative) in their language. Thus, the
relative ranking of cues may often differ across different languages, even when the
languages on a formal level are typologically
similar (e.g. Italian and English).
Developmental
studies using the sentence interpretation
paradigm to study
children as young as two years of age indicate that cue validity based on adult usage
is a strong predictor of the developmental
sequence of acquisition
of the cues.
Word order (SVO) is the first cue to emerge in English-speaking
children and
nominative/accusative
case marking is the first to emerge in Turkish children
(Bates and MacWhinney
1987). Within
the Competition
Model framework,
lan-
guage learning is viewed as a process of incrementing
and adjusting the weights of
form-function
mappings until there is an optimal fit with the processing environment (MacWhinney
1987).
STUDIES
WITH
BRAIN-INJURED
INDIVIDUALS
Given that there are differences in how normal listeners monitor different cues in
the input, one might expect differences in cue validity to be reflected in the pattern
of language impairment
of brain-damaged
individuals.
In fact, language-specific
differences in cue strength appear to be preserved in aphasics (see Bates et al. 1987).
In general, the cue that has the highest strength in premorbid language use appears
to be the most resistant to impairment
following brain damage. At the same time,
there appears to be a global impairment
of certain cues (e.g. subject-verb
agreement) regardless of their premorbid status in a particular language, and a selective
164
Journal of Neurolinguistics,
sparing
aphasics
of other
cues. e.g. word
using the sentence
SENTENCE
A recent
Volume 3, Number 2 (1988)
INTERPRETATION
extension
order
interpretation
(see Bates et al. in press).
paradigm
Research
on
is still in its infancy.
IN BILINGUALS
of the sentence
interpretation
paradigm
has involv,ed
a
comparison
of sentence interpretation
strategies used by bilinguals
or second
language learners in their two languages. This topic has thus far been addressed in
users of predominantly
Indo-European
languages including Spanish (Wulfeck 6’1
al. 1986) and German (Bates and MacWhinney
1981: McDonald
1984). but a few
other language families are also being studied. typically with English being one of
the two languages under study. These other languages include Dutch(Kilborn
1986:
Kilborn and Cooreman
1987). Korean (Park 1986), Japanese (Kilborn and Ito
1987) and Hindi (Vaid et (11. 1987).
On a theoretical level. the sentence interpretation
task in bilinguals 15of interest
in that it allows a test of different hypothesized
views about bilingual language
representation.
Most previous work in this area has concentrated
on the lexical
level, typically using lists of unrelated
words. The sentence interpretation
task
allows for an examination
of higher-level language comprehension
strategies in
each language.
POSSIBLE
OUTCOMES
IN BILINGLIALS
A priori.
one can distinguish
between four different possible outcomes on
the task, reflecting different forms of internal representation
of bilingual discourse.
Assuming
language-specific
differences
on the task (as reflected in different
strategies used by monolingual
speakers of the different languages). one possible
outcome for bilinguals on this task may be a transfer of first language strategies to
the second language. This outcome would be expected for individuals
at early
stages of second language exposure and/or
proficiency
and would support a
“subordinate”
form of bilingual language organization.
where the first language
cues remain dominant and the second language is processed in terms of cues that
are salient in the first language (see McDonald
1987). A second possible outcome
is one in which the bilingual shows a different pattern in each language, corresponding to the ranking of cues of monolingual
speakers of the respective languages
This kind of response would support a”coordinate”
form of representation
where
distinct sentence comprehension
strategies are used for the two languages. A third
possible outcome is where bilinguals
show a unified strategy in each 01 their
languages. but this strategy differs from that used by monolingual
speakers of the
Bilingual Sentence Interpretation
languages
and represents
of the languages.
an amalgam
Such an outcome
or merger of cues that are dominant
would be consistent
with a “compound”
165
in each
form of
representation
(see Wulfeck et al. 1986). Finally, it is possible that bilinguals may
show a reverse subordinate
pattern such that their performance
on their second
language is comparable to that of monolingual
speakers of that language and their
performance
on their native language is influenced by their second language. Such
an outcome might be expected to arise if the bilinguals are more practised in their
second language than in their first. These four hypothesized
outcomes are not
mutually exclusive nor are they rigid over time. Rather, at different stages of a
bilingual’s language history, different outcomes may be observed. For example,
McDonald
(1984) found that L2 speakers with little exposure to the second
language use Ll strengths; with increasing L2 exposure the L2 speakers shift to
appropriate
L2 weights.
means of classification.
The outcomes
should
thus be viewed merely as a useful
In what follows, sentence interpretation
data are presented from adult bilingual
speakers of Kannada and English. A language from the Dravidian language family
used primarily in south India, Kannada is spoken by over five million speakers.
Sentence interpretation
data are presented from a group of brain-intact
Kannada
monolingual
adults and Kannada-English
bilinguals and from a smaller group of
aphasic counterparts.
To date there has been only one published study of sentence
interpretation
in bilingual aphasics (Wulfeck ef al. 1986).
RELEVANT
CHARACTERISTICS
OF KANNADA
GRAMMAR
Some remarks are in order at this point about the characteristics
of Kannada of
relevance to the sentence interpretation
task. First. Kannada is a case-marked
language. The case system of Kannada
is similar to that of other Dravidian
languages in that various suffixes are added to the noun stem to indicate different
relationships
between the noun and the other sentence constituents.
The cases
include
the nominative,
genitive,
dative,
locative,
instrumental;
ablative,
vocative
and accusative (Schiffman
1979).
The basic colloquial accusative marker is - anna/ - annu. It is used with both
“rational”
(capable of thought) and “non-rational”
referents (usually animals,
young children and inanimate objects). It is also possible for the accusative markers
to be omitted entirely except in the case of rational (masculine and feminme) nouns.
Case markers used with plural nouns are usually the same as those used with the
singular, but often in colloquial Kannada the plural marker -galu
is not used, 50
the singular can be found even when more than one object is meant. In previous
sentence interpretation
studies performed on other case-marked
languages (e.g.
Serbo-Croation),
case has emerged as a dominant cue. It is likely to play a strong
NEL
3:2-D
166
Journal of Neurolinguistics,
role in Kannada
sentence
Volume 3, Number 2 (1988)
interpretation
as well. Since our interest
was In com-
paring Kannada and English on cues that both languages possess to a comparable
degree, it was decided to delete the accusative case marker from the Kannada
stimuli so as to render the task of interpretation
at least as ambiguous as that in
English. The cues chosen for study in the two languages. then. were noun animac!;.
noun-verb
agreement and word order.
Word order may perhaps be a weaker cue in Kannada than in English since
Kannada
permits more variation
in word order, given that linguistic roles are
normally signalled by case markers. Moreover, Kannada uses a subject-object
verb (SOV) word order. VSO or VOS word orders are stylistic variations
referred
to as “after thought” word orders used in colloquial speech (Schiffman
1979). The
nature of the word order effect might be expected to differ in Kannada and English.
a SVO language.
The subject in Kannada sentences agrees with the verb in number and gender. We
would thus expect the agreement cue to be at least as strong as that in English and
perhaps stronger since non-verb
agreement
in English is only on the basl5 of
number. There is no a priori basis for expecting a difference in the strength of the
animacy cue in the two languages. In neither language IS noun ammacy overtI>,
marked; rather it 1s one of the semantic properties associated with a noun.
STUDY
I
Sentence
Interpretation
In order to understand
in Brain-intact
Kannada-English
Kannada Speakers
bilinguals
performance
on the sentence
interpretation
task, it is important
to understand
the cues used by monolingual
Kannada speakers. Thus both groups were tested.
Method
Subjects
Subjects included
a group of 8 Kannada
monolinguals
and 21 Kannada-Enghsh
bilinguals. All were right-handed.
The monolingual
sample included 2 males and 6
females ranging in age from 21 to 60 years with a mean age of 40 years. The bilingual
sample ranged in age from 20 to 62 years with a mean age of 3 1 years and included 6
females and 15 males.
The bilinguals’
mother tongue was Kannada
in all cases. They had studied
English in school until their second year of college and had been enrolled in
English-medium
schools throughout
their education.
Many subjects also received
post-graduate
training in English. As such, the sample was highly fluent in English.
A brief questionnaire
administered
to the bilinguals revealed that the majority of
Bilingual Sentence Interpretation
subjects
newspaper
reported
using
and writing
English
letters;
at work
Kannada
and
with friends
was used primarily
161
and in reading
the
at home and with
friends.
Stimuli
For each language,
a total of 54 sentences
were constructed.
The stimuli
were all
simple, active, declarative sentences with two concrete nouns and a transitive action
verb. All three word orders (NVN, VNN and NNV) were tested in orthogonal
combinations
of noun animacy (both nouns are animate, yielding semanticallyreversible sentences;
only the first noun is animate;
only the second noun is
animate) and noun-verb
agreement (the verb agrees with both nouns in number;
the verb agrees only with the first noun; the verb agrees only with the second noun).
The 3 X 3 X 3 factorial design resulted in a total of 27 sentences. Two examples of
each sentence type were included, yielding a total of 54 sentences. To minimize the
effect of extralinguistic,
real world knowledge on sentence comprehension,
the
stimuli were prepared using a random assignment of animate and inanimate nouns
to the designated slots in the sentences. While the Kannada and English sentences
were not translation
equivalents,
they were constructed
from the same pool of
words. The set of nouns and verbs used to generate the stimuli in each language is
provided in the Appendix.
Procedure
Subjects were all tested individually.
The sentences were read out loud one at a
time in a neutral intonation
by the examiner (SC) who is a native speaker of
Kannada and fluent in English. Upon hearing each sentence, subjects were to indicate which of the two nouns - the first or the second - had performed the action
described in the sentence. Practice trials were given to ensure that subjects understood the task. The order of testing for the bilinguals was alternated across subjects
such that half were tested in Kannada first followed by English while the remainder
were first tested in English. A gap of at least a day separated the two testing sessions.
Scoring
If the first preverbal noun mentioned was chosen as the actor, subjects received a
score of 1. Choice of the second noun was assigned a score of0. Since there were two
sentences with each possible combination
of the three factors, the maximum score
possible was 2, indicating
that subjects chose the first noun both times for that
sentence type. The dependent variable was the percentage choice of the first noun as
agent. Chance performance
would be designated by 50%; 100% would indicate a
choice of the first noun on every item and 0% a choice of the second noun.
168
Journal
of Neurolinguistics,
Volume
3, Number
2 (1988)
Results
Analyses of variance were performed on the percentage of lirst preverbal nouns
chosen as the agent for each sentence type. The monolingual
data were analyzed
first tn a separate analysis of vartance and were subsequently
compared with the
bilinguals’ Kannada data tn a combined analysts of vartancc. The bilinguals’ data
were further analyzed to compare performance
tn their two languages.
Kannada Monolinguals
Mean scores ranging from 0 to 2 on the sentence interpretation
test were entered
into a 3 X 3 X 3 analysis of variance as a function of noun animacy, word order and
verb agreement. There were two significant effects: a main effect of animacy (pc
.OOOl) and an animacy X agreement
interaction
(pc .OOl). The animacy effect
accounted for 84c7, of the variance while the two-way interaction accounted for an
additional
8qc of the vartance. Table I summarizes
the ANOVA results for the
monolinguals.
Table I
Summary of ANOVA of
Kannada Normal Monolinguals (n=8)
Source
df
F
P
Animacy
Agreement
Word order
2, 14
2, 14
2. 14
80.63
3.12
0.14
,000 1*
,076 ns
,672 ns
Animacy
Animacy
4, 28
4, 28
5.97
0.85
.001*
.507 ns
4. 28
8. 56
0.94
0.79
456 ns
,612 ns
X agreement
X order
Agreement X order
Animacy X agreement
X order
* Significant
ns, not significant
The main effect of animacy indicated that the percentage choice of the first noun
as agent was much higher when the first noun m the sentence was animate and the
second noun was inanimate (88Yc) than when both nouns were animate (6357’) or
only the second noun was animate (254). The interaction
of animacy and agreement revealed that verb agreement was used as a cue only when animacy cues were
neutral or absent. as when both nouns in the sentence are animate.
In this
condition,
the percentage choice of the first noun was 794% when the first noun
agreed in number with the verb, whereas tt fell to 40 c?cwhen the second noun agreed
Bilingual Sentence Interpretation
with the verb. With animacy
diminished
noun
cues present,
the agreement
as in the animate-inanimate
condition
choice in the first-noun-agreement
169
effect was either greatly
(compare
94% vs. 81% first-
and second-noun-agreement
conditions,
respectively)
or was completely
absent, as in the inanimate-animate
condition
(where the percentage choice of first noun remained a low 29% for first-noun and
second-noun-agreement
conditions).
The word order effect was not significant
in Kannada:
subjects showed a
consistent preference of the first noun (around 6OYo) for all three word orders.
Figure 1 illustrates the performance
of the Kannada monolinguals
relative to
that of English monolinguals
tested in previous studies by Bates and colleagues.
Note that while the agreement effect is weak in both language groups, the animacy
effect is particularly
strong in Kannada relative to English while the reverse is true
for the word order effect.
I
0
Kannado
A
English
‘71
I
\
\
d’
1
\
I
4
I
NVN
Word
VNN
I
\
I
b
I
I
NNV
order
An ~macy
Agreement
Monolinguals
Figure 1.
Kannada vs. English Monolinguals:
Animacy and Agreement.
Kannada
Monolinguals
A 2 X 3 X 3 X 3 factorial
vs. Kannada-English
analysis
of variance
Main Effects of Word Order,
Bilinguals
was performed
on Kannada
on the Kannada
data
170
Journal of Neurolinguistics,
Volume 3, Number 2 (1988)
of monolinguals
and bilinguals.
All three within-subject
variables (animacy,
agreement and word order) were highly significant, as were two two-way mteractions: animacy X agreement (p < .OOOl) and animacyX word order(p .:: .002). It
is noteworthy
that there were no significant
bilingual/monolingual
group differences nor were there any significant interactions
involving the group variable.
Kannada-English
A four-way
Bilinguals
analysis
on Kannada vs. English
of variance
(animacy
by agreement
by word
order
by
language) was performed on the bilinguals’data
to compare their performance
on
their two languages. A summary of the ANOVA results is presented in Table 2.
The analysis indicated significant main effects of animacy, agreement and word
order as well as 2 two-way interactions:
animacy X agreement (p c: .0009) and
Table 2
Summary of ANOVA for
Kannada-English
Normal Bilinguals (n = 21)
Source
Animacy
Agreement
Word order
Language
Animacy X agreement
Animacy X order
Agreement X order
Animacy X language
Agreement X language
Order X language
Animacy X agreement X language
Animacy X order X language
Agreement X order X language
Animacy X agreement X order
Animacy X agreement X order X language
* Significant
ns. not significant
df
F
P
2.40
2.40
2,40
1,20
4,80
4,80
168.95
16.65
8.55
1.63
5.19
6.76
4.80
2,40
2.40
2.40
4,80
0.31
0.53
0.53
1.04
4.80
1.38
3.04
3.26
1.81
.0001*
.0001*
.0008*
.22 ns
.0009*
.0001*
.87 ns
4,80
4,80
8,160
8.160
.59 ns
.59 ns
.36 ns
.002*
.25 ns
.02*
.002*
.08 ns
Bilingual Sentence Interpretation
animacy
X order (p < .OOOl). In addition,
171
there were three higher order interactions:
animacy X agreement X order (p < .002) and language X animacy X agreement
(p < .02). Figure 2 illustrates the three main effects in each language.
The main effect of animacy accounted for the greatest proportion of the variance
(82%), while the main effect of agreement accounted for 8% and the interaction
effects together constituted
about 1070 of the variance.
o
Kannada
A English
80 Iu
;
0
5
fro-
‘tB,
e
--Cl
‘1
.E
E
40-
20 -
0
I
NVN
I
VNN
Word
I
NNL
I
AA
order
I
I
I
Al
IA
NJ0
Anrnacy
Normal bilinguab
Figure 2.
Kannada-English
Agreement
Bilinguals:
I
Agl
I
Ag2
Agreement
( n = 2 I)
Effects of Word Order, Animacy
and
by Language.
Let us examine the two higher-order interaction effects involving language. The
means for the language X animacy X agreement effect are summarized in Table 3.
Note first that in both Kannada and English the presence of an animate first noun
greatly increases the percentage choice of the first noun as agent while the presence
of an inanimate first noun greatly reduces it. When animacy cues are absent (when
both nouns in the sentence are animate)
the choice of agent is governed by
agreement cues. These cues appear to be stronger for Kannada than for English.
172
Journal of Neurolinguistics,
Volume 3, Number 2 (1988)
Table 3
Kannada-English
Normal Bilinguals (n = 21):
Language X Animacy X Agreement
Interaction
Means (in %)
English
Kannada
AA
Al
IA
AgO
f%l
AS
AgO
Agl
AS
72
88
8
86
93
24
47
78
12
59
80
16
68
87
36
53
66
20
The other interaction
effect was language X agreement X word order. Table 4
provides a summary of the interaction means. Inspection of the table suggests that
the source of the interaction hes in the NNV condition:
when agreement is with the
ftrst noun in this word order condition,
the percentage choice of the ftrst noun 1s
much higher in Kannada (7O?e) than it is in English(56qe). The analogous effect for
NVN word order does not appear to be present. that is, the percentage choice of the
first noun is only marginally higher in English than in Kannada (74$$ vs. 68%)) when
agreement is with the first noun in the NVN condition.
Table 4
Kannada-English
Normal Bilinguals
(n = 21):
Language X Word Order X Agreement
Interaction Means (in %)
English
Kannada
AgO
NVN
VNN
NNV
61
53
54
Ad
A@
68
65
70
55
44
40
AgO
Ad
49
60
48
47
74
60
56
52
46
42
Bilingual Sentence Interpretation
173
Discussion
It would appear that animacy is the cue with the greatest cue strength in
Kannada at least among the cues tested, since case would presumably have been a
strong cue in Kannada as well. In monolinguals
and bilinguals alike, the animacy
main effect accounted for by far the largest proportion of the variance. The cue used
next appears to be verb agreement, although its effect is evident only in the absence
of animacy cues. The weakest cue seems to be word order.
The performance
of bilinguals on Kannada was indistinguishable
from that of
Kannada monolinguals.
While this finding may not be all that surprising given that
Kannada was the first language of the bilinguals, it is nevertheless interesting that
the bilinguals were not in any way influenced by their exposure to English, despite
their apparently high level of proficiency in English. As such, the present study does
not support hypothesized outcome 4 stated at the outset. One can speculate that the
word order cue was not used by Kannada-English
bilinguals when processing
English because the English spoken in India has different structural properties than
the English spoken in America. While there may be some basis for this speculation
it should be pointed out that HindiiEnglish
bilingual speakers do rely on word
order when processing English (see Vaid et al. 1987). Thus the observed lack of
reliance on word order in Kannada speakers would appear to suggest a languagespecific influence of Kannada, rather than sociolinguistic
differences in the nature
of English used in India.
When we consider the bilinguals’ performance
noteworthy
that across both languages animacy
on Kannada vs. English, it is
again accounted for the most
variance (over 80%). Word order was a relatively weak cue, even in English. In the
two instances
where language differences
were significant,
the nature of the
difference was such that the effect (of agreement in one case and of word order in
another) was more pronounced
in Kannada
than in English. Specifically with
regard to the word order effect, while NVN sentences yielded a slight first-noun
preference in both Kannada and English, NNV sentences yielded a strong firstnoun preference in Kannada as compared to that in English. This difference reflects
the different structural properties of the two languages, inasmuch as Kannada is a
SOV language whereas the typical response of native English speakers to the noncanomcal NNV word order is to choose the second noun as agent (see MacWhinney
et al. 1984).
Thus, it would appear that the response of the bilinguals on this task supports the
first of the four hypothesized
outcomes,
namely, a transfer of first language
strategies onto the second language. The results do not support a situation where
bilinguals show a particular ranking of cues in one language and another ranking in
the other language. Rather, their performance
on Kannada is almost identical to
174
Journal of Neurolinguistics.
Volume 3, Number 2 (1988)
that of Kannada monolinguals.
version of their Kannada-based
while their performance
on English is a muted
strategy and in no way resembles the performance
of English-speaking
monolinguals.
This outcome is somewhat surprising given the
high degree of English language proficiency reported by the bilinguals. The present
results suggest, therefore. that the sentence interpretation
strategies observed need
not be related in any obvious way to the individual’s level of proficiency.
Alternatively, it may be that. at the level of discourse processing, proficiency may mean
something different.
STUDY
Sentence
2
Interpretation
in Aphasic
In this section of the paper,
interpretation
task administered
Kannada-speaking
adults.
Kannada Speakers
we summarize
the findings from the sentence
to a group of left-hemisphere
damaged native
Method
Subjects
Two monolingual
Kannada aphasics, S.A. and B.B., were tested at the National
Institute of Mental Health and Neurological
Sciences (NIMHANS)
in Bangalore.
Both were patients at the Speech Pathology unit at NIMHANS where, on the basrs
of a standard aphasia test battery adapted to Kannada. they were diagnosed as
being receptive aphasics. In addition, three Kannada-English
aphasic bihnguals
who were also patients at NIMHANS
were tested. Two of these patients( K. K. and
J. P.) had been diagnosed as expressive aphasics and the third (N.D.) was a
receptive aphasic. While it was not possible to obtain a detailed premorbid
language use inventory on the bilingual patients, a brief interview with the patients’
immediate family confirmed that the bilingual patients’ language background
and
premorbid
language use was not all that different from that reported for the
bilingual controls in Study 1.
Criteria used to exclude patients from participation
in this study included the
following: (a) a history of multiple strokes; (b) significant hearing and/or visual
deficits; (c) severe gross motor disabilities; (d) severe motor speech involvements
such that speech was all but unintelligible;
and (e) evidence of neurological
instability and/ or testing less than 3 months post-onset of insult.
Monolingual Aphasics
Both monolingual
patients S. A. and B. B. spoke Kannada as a mother tongue
and had Kannada as the medium of instruction
m school through graduation
S.A. had suffered a post-traumatic
cerebral contusion and an acute subdural
Bilingual Sentence Interpretation
hematoma
in the left temporal
lobe following
a traffic accident.
175
On the basis of a
Kannada
adaptation
of the Western Aphasia Battery, S.A. was diagnosed
as
having Wernicke’s asphasia. S,A.‘s language functions were tested 15 days postinsult. At the time of testing, S.A. had a mild hemiparesis and aphasic symptoms.
B.B. was diagnosed on the basis of a CT scan as having had an infarct in the left
temporoparietal
region. His language functions
were tested four months postinsult using the Western Aphasia Battery and, like S.A., he was also classified as a
Wernicke’s aphasic. At the time of testing one and a half years post-insult, B.B. had
almost recovered from a right hemiparesis but still had aphasic symptoms.
Bilingual Aphasics
All three bilingual aphasics. J.P., K.K. and N.D., had studied Kannada and
English in school as their first and second language, respectively. From grade 10, all
three had English as the medium of instruction
and used English in their work.
The etiology of J.P.‘s brain injury, as indicated by a CT scan, was a left cervical
internal carotid aneurysm with cerebral embolism. The other two patients were not
Table 5
Background
Subjects’
initials
type
K mono
B.B.
K mono
Group
Information
Aphasia
on Kannada Aphasics
Sex
Age
Hand
dom.
Etiology
Receptive
M
37
R
Left internal carotid
insufficiency.
Right hemiparesis
1.5 years
earlier
S.A.
Receptive
M
27
R
Left temporal lobe problems
due to left subdural
hematoma
K-E bi
N.D.
Receptive
M
3s
R
Left internal
insufficiency
carotid
K-E bi
K.K.
Expressive
M
56
R
Left internal
insufficiency
carotid
K-E bi
J.P.
Expressive
M
30
R
Left internal
insufficiency
carotid
176
Journal of Neurolinguistics,
Volume 3, Number 2 (1988)
advised to have a CT scan done and were diagnosed
simply as having a left carotid
insufficiency,
that is, inadequate blood supply to the cortical lobes by the middle
cerebral artery, perhaps as a result of a thrombosis or embolism. All three patients
had hemiplegia with aphasia. N.D. had almost recovered from the hemiplegia at the
time of testing.
Language testing of K.K. was done three months after the cerebral insult, one
month post-insult
for J.P. and two years post-insult for N.D. Table 5 provides a
summary of the background
characteristics
of the patients.
Stimuli and Procedure
The same set of sentences used in Study 1 were administered
to the braindamaged subjects. Sentences were read aloud to the patients by the same examiner
who had tested the normal subjects. Patients signalled their responses by pointing
to the appropriate
noun on the stimulus sheet. Sufficient practice trials were given
to ensure that the patients understood
the task. Bilinguals were tested in therr two
languages in separate sessions, with the order of the sessions being varred across
subjects.
The data were coded as in Study I with the additional feature that a score of 5
was assigned on any trial on which subjects failed to make a response.
Table 6
Performance of Kannada-English
Bilingual Aphasics
(Percentage Choice of First Noun)
Animacy
AA
AI
IA
84
72
61
44
72
16
Agreement
AgO
AgJ
Ag2
61
84
72
56
28
50
Word order
NVN
VNN
NNV
72
61
84
34
44
56
Bilingual Sentence Interpretation
177
Results
Monolingual
Aphasics
Given the small sample size, an analysis of variance was not conducted.
the data from the two monolingual
aphasics are individually
summarized
Instead,
in Table
6.
Inspection
of the mean percentage choice of first-noun scores suggests that the
animacy cue was used by both subjects and was particularly
dominant
for B.B.
When the first noun of the sentence was animate. B. B. chose the first noun as agent
72% of the time as compared to 16% of the time when the first noun was inanimate.
Animacy may have been the only cue utilized systematically
by B. B. inasmuch as
his performance
on the other two factors appears to be essentially random.
S. A., on the other hand, showed some sensitivity to verb agreement, choosing
the first noun as agent 84% of the time when that noun agreed with the verb, as
compared to 61% of the time when agreement was ambiguous.
S. A. also appeared
to favor a first-noun
preference for sentences with the order NNV (84%) and to a
lesser extent for NVN sentences (72%).
Bilingual Aphasics on Kannada vs. English
Owing to the small sample size it was not advisable
to conduct
a statistical
Table 7
Performance of Kannada-English
Bilingual Aphasics
(Percentage Choice of First Noun)
Kannada
N.D.
Animacy
Agreement
K.K.
AA
39
72
83
AI
IA
83
0
100
6
89
39
AgO
61
33
39
56
67
56
83
67
61
50
67
61
50
67
67
78
Ag1
Ag2
Word order
J.P.
NVN
VNN
NNV
44
39
Con td.
178
Journal of Neurolinguistics,
Volume 3. Number 2 (1988)
Table 7 -
Contd.
English
Animacy
AA
AI
IA
Agreement
AgO
Agl
Ag2
Word order
61
44
89
11
100
17
39
61
50
NVN
44
VNN
56
61
NNV
61
50
89
11
50
50
56
50
44
56
50
50
44
50
56
analysis of the data. The data from the three bilingual aphasics are therefore
summarized
in Table 7.
In all three bilingual patients, the animacy cue appears to have been spared, in
both Kannada and English. The percentage choice of the first noun was generally
higher when the first noun was animate (the scores ranged from 83 to 100%) than
when the first noun was inanimate (the scores ranged from 0 to 3996).
By contrast,
the agreement
cue appears to be largely unavailable
in either
language. for none of the subjects showed a clear main effect of agreement.
Had
there been more subjects, it would have been possible to examine whether the
agreement cue is in fact present under certain conditions of the other two factors.
Similarly, word order does not appear to have been a salient cue for the bilingual
aphasics. particularly in English, where performance was essentially at chance level
for all subjects. In Kannada,
one subject (K. K.) showed a slight effect of word
order, favoring a first-noun
preference for NNV sentences (78”~).
Discussion
Given the small numbers of patients tested, any generalizations
drawn from the
aphasia data must be made with caution and should be viewed largely m terms of
their heuristic value. Even with such a small sample size, certain trends were
observed. For one thing, it would appear that semantic information,
as reflected in
the animacy variable, is clearly preserved in these aphasics. As such the present data
are consistent with those reported for German aphasics (Bates et ul. 1987) who also
Bilingual Sentence Interpretation
showed a sparing
that
what
should
of animacy.
This sparing of animacy
be preserved
in aphasia
is consistent
179
with the notion
are cues that were premorbidly
the
strongest cues in the language. As we have already seen in Study 1, animacy was in
fact the strongest cue for Kannada speakers.
There does not appear to be a sparing of grammatical morphology in the present
sample of aphasics. This vulnerability
of morphological
cues is consistent
with
observations
reported on native English-speaking
and Italian aphasics (Bates et al.
1987). but does not appear to be restricted to aphasics, for it is found even among
non-aphasic
brain-damaged
individuals (Bates et al. 1987). The theoretical significance of this finding remains to be determined.
Finally, word order appears to have been partially spared in the present sample.
One of the monolinguals
(S. A.) and one of the bilinguals (K. K.) showed a firstnoun preference for NNV sentences in Kannada,
consistent
with the strategy
observed in brain-intact
monolingual
and bilingual Kannada controls. This preference for the first noun as agent in sentences in which two nouns precede the verb
reflects an SOV interpretation
of this particular word order. It is noteworthy that,
even in the absence of case markers, both brain-intact
and brain-damaged
individuals were sensitive to this statistical and structural property of Kannada.
CONCLUSION
The normative
bilingual data (Study
tation in which first language discourse
1) support a view of bilingual represenstrategies are mapped onto the second
language. The fact that this particular outcome was observed in our subject sample
despite the relative fluency and competence of our subjects in English is particularly
interesting and contrasts with the pattern observed for a group of Hindi-English
bilinguals (Vaid et al. 1987).
In the aphasic bilingual group as well, when there was a sparing of cues, it was in
favor of cues that are used in Kannada
or, alternatively,
the cue that is most
dominant
in Kannada
(namely,
animacy)
was extended
to English sentence
interpretation
as well, whereas the cue that is normally
speakers (namely, word order) was relatively
and normals alike.
the strongest
absent in Kannada
cue in English
speakers,
aphasics
180
Journal of Neurolinguistics,
Volume 3, Number 2 (1988)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research was partially
supported
by a National
Institute
of Health Research
Grant on cross-linguistic
studies of aphasia awarded to Elizabeth Bates of the
University of California, San Diego and by a Council for International
Exchange
of Scholars Indo-American
Advanced Research Fellowship awarded to Jyotsna
Vaid. We acknowledge
with gratitude the Speech Pathology unit of the National
Institute of Mental Health and Neurological
Sciences in Bangalore. India, under
whose auspices the data were collected. Tom Battocletti and Miguel Quinones of
Texas A & M University assisted in data analysis. We thank Janet McDonald for
her comments on the manuscript.
Requests for reprints may be directed to the first
author c/o Department
of Psychology. Texas A & M University. College Station,
TX 778434235,
U.S.A.
l&II
Bilingual Sentence Interpretation
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Bilingual
Sentence
Interpretation
APPENDIX
Pool of Sentence
Animate
Inanimate
Verbs
nouns
nouns
Interpretation
Stimuli
English
Kannada
Zebra
Pig
Elephant
Bear
Donkey
cow
Monkey
Donkey
Elephant
Cat
Donkey
Block
Rock
Ball
Pencil
Stick
Umbrella
Ball
Book
Hitting
Biting
Smelling
Patting
Eating
Kissing
Pushing
Grabbing
Hitting
Biting
Touching
Patting
Eating
Kicking
Pushing
Calling
Licking
Licking
cow
183