Narrative Discourse of Kannada-English Bilingual Individuals with Traumatic Brain Injury: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Individuals while speaking in two different languages may essentially have different thought patterns in the languages they use while speaking, this is the linguistic relativity hypothesis. However there is dearth of studies in checking validity of linguistic hypothesis in disordered population (with traumatic brain injury). Thus present study is an attempt in particular to investigate how and when narrating, a bilingual individual with TBI expresses verbal notions through the appropriate use of voices, aspect and tense forms which are accessible in each of their two languages and study tries to inspect the narration ability of 20 bilingual individual with TBI. Participants were required to narrate in English and Kannada languages which were video recorded. Target task oral narratives, where usage of past tense was expected when representing string of events which are taking place in a particular sequence. Narrative discourses were quantified separately as fours variables under T-unit analysis. The variables were number of words per clauses and number of clauses, number of words per T unit and number of T units. The statistical results showed significant differences in all parameters and lower mean was obtained in English narrative discourse when compared to Kannada narrative discourse.