| Summary: | Introduction:
This study asks whether Spanish-English bilinguals with agrammatism perform better than comparable monolingual Spanish speakers on a test of copular verb production. We chose the Spanish dual-copula system, because its two copula verbs: ser and estar (meaning ‘be’ in English), differ semantically (depending on the context of the sentence), as well as in overall frequency and form-regularity.
We asked: Do bilingual Spanish-English speakers with agrammatism perform differently from their monolingual Spanish counterparts on a test comparing the effects of TMA Frequency, VF Regularity and CGC on verb production?
Methodology:
Participants were asked to complete 130 written sentences orally with the correct verb-form.
E.g., “¿Donde ______ la pelota?” (está)- “Where is the ball?”
Six sentence types were employed to compare among the three factors:
1) High TMA Frequency/Low VF Regularity (ser in present tense)
2) High TMA Frequency/High VF Regularity (estar in present tense)
3) Low TMA Frequency/Low VF Regularity (ser in imperfect past tense)
4) Low TMA Frequency/High VF Regularity (estar in imperfect past tense)
5) High TMA Frequency/High CGC (sentences requiring either ser or
estar in the present tense and result in a semantic change)
6) High TMA Frequency/Low CGC (sentences allowing a choice of either
ser or estar in the present tense and do not result in a semantic change)
Participants:
Six Spanish-speaking participants with agrammatism were tested. Three had been highly proficient bilingual Spanish-English speakers, while the other three were relatively monolingual Spanish speakers. All had suffered left-frontal strokes at least 6 months prior to this study (X= 3.4 years) and were judged agrammatic (in both languages, for bilinguals) based on the effortfulness of their spontaneous speech, short phrase-length, high substantive-word use, omission of functors, and relatively good comprehension. Twelve non-aphasic Spanish-English speakers served as controls, and were matched for language history, age, educational attainment, and relative socio-economic status.
Results and Conclusions:
In general, participants with agrammatism made markedly more errors on this task (X= 40%) than control participants (X= 4%), thus reinforcing our finding that despite high frequency in daily usage, ser and estar are not resistant to agrammatism (O’Connor Wells, 2011; O’Connor, Obler & Goral, 2007).
A mixed-effects logistic regression analysis of the bilingual vs. monolingual data, revealed a trend (p = 0.07) for the mean performance of the bilinguals with agrammatism (65%) to be greater than that of the monolinguals (54%). Although the direction of their performance was the same, the bilinguals with agrammatism outperformed the monolingual ones on all three of our verb factors. These data are consistent with the possibility that bilingualism facilitates language performance among bilinguals in their first language.
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