THE STUDY OF COMMUNICATION SKILL AMONG MALAY-SPEAKING ADULTS WITH APHASIA

This study examined the verb and noun production abilities in Aphasic Patient speech using the Malay Verb and Noun Test (MVAN). The performance of two groups of participants: control subjects and aphasia was assessed via picture-naming task. A total of 14 Malay-speaking adults with aphasia, aged 28-64 years old (min=50.70) and 20 age-, gender- and education-matched controls, 28-71 years old (min= 52.29) native speakers of Malay were recruited. 52 nouns and 32 verbs which were controlled for syllable length, imageability and familiarity were elicited and converted to black and white picture cards. The subjects were asked to name the object in the card. The findings revealed that the group of control subjects were able to produce nouns better than verbs compared to the subjects with aphasia group. The subject with fluent aphasia group showed better performance in both nouns and verbs production than the non-fluent subject aphasia group. Overall the predominant categories of error type exhibited by all subjects were the semantically-related errors and unrelated-response errors. The results also have shown that when the influence of confounding factors is considered such as imageability and familiarity, there is no evidence for word class specific deficits among subject with aphasia. The findings also reinforce the use of picture naming to assess impaired word retrieval and have provided some useful data in the production of nouns and verbs of Malay adults with aphasia.