Sentence Production in Standard Indonesian Agrammatism

For individuals with agrammatic aphasia, producing sentences with non-canonical word orders is a challenging feat. Studies on different languages report deficits in this area of sentence production: some citing problems related to retrieval of verb morphology while others pursue a more holistic approach by attributing the root of the deficit towards the process of thematic role assignment. It has been shown that agrammatic speakers of Standard Indonesian are relatively unimpaired in the use (in spontaneous speech) and comprehension of passive constructions. These studies suggest the high frequency of the passive structure in Standard Indonesian may play a role in its retrieval and processing. For the current study, we tested sentence production in agrammatic speakers of Standard Indonesian. The purpose of the present study is to assess the effects of syntactic frequency and word order on sentence production in agrammatic speakers of Standard Indonesian. Twelve agrammatic speakers were tested with a picture elicitation task. The participants had to produce active and passive, reversible and non-reversible sentences. No main effects of sentence type were observed; reversible and non-reversible active and passive sentences were produced with comparable accuracy. Despite this observation, the majority of errors produced were associated with role-reversals and verb inflection. Lack of a specific deficit in the production of structures with non-canonical word order suggests the impact of syntactic frequency on agrammatic sentence processing. As with previous studies on Indonesian sentence comprehension, the present results provide evidence for the preservation of the passive structure in agrammatic speakers of Standard Indonesian.