Phonological Errors on Impaired Language Modality Produced by Individuals with Broca’s Aphasia

Abstract

Nearly all of Broca's aphasic patients have the tendency to produce phonological errors in their non-fluent speech output. The grade of errors may vary depending on the severity of brain pathology, affected language area, and the scope of impaired sounds. Any types of the phonological process might be found in their weakening language modalities. So, the present study investigates the severity of the aphasics’ language modality, phonemic and phonetic errors of the impaired speech. This descriptive study analyzes Balinese speech produced by three individuals who suffer from Broca’s aphasia. To find out, they were requested to repeat words, name pictures, answer questions and read short text orally. As the result, their language modalities were categorized severe. The listeners required some hard efforts to conclude, question and predict what the informants said and further communication was impossible on more complex words. They produce not only distortions as phonetic errors but also substitutions, deletions, insertions, and metatheses as phonemic errors. Sound substitutions mostly appeared in a greater percentage for every phonological task given. By analyzing the errors with generative phonology, the findings suggest that the PND can lead a better phonetic realization, one of which is by substituting the target sounds in terms of their phonological features similarity. Though phonemic processing is more common in fluent aphasia, non-fluent aphasics also produced sonority substitutions. Furthermore, there was not synchronous coordination between the underlying form in the posterior region and phonetic representation in the anterior region due to the loss of the linguistic message.