Aphasia Language Rehabilitation: a Year Period on Individual with Global Aphasia
Indonesian Language Education Department, Sebelas Maret University Surakarta, Indonesia
ABSTRACT
The individuals with global aphasia have all of the aspects of language impairment such as production and comprehension. Even though the impairment is severe, an aphasic individual is still able to communicate with normal people. Yet, that communication ability depends on how an individual with global aphasia gets the language rehabilitation after stroke attack. This study aims to describe the language ability of an individual with global aphasia who experienced rehabilitation within a year since the stroke attack. This study used qualitative research with case study approach with one subject. Research subject was an Indonesian woman with Javanese language as a colloquial language suffering from a stroke who has global aphasia aged 57 years. The subject was observed by her phonemes, word-utterance, and self-knowing. A depth interview with the family and the language therapist from the hospital was done in order to validate the data. The first result of this research was the subject tended to pronounce wrong phonemes, especially phonemes that have sound similarity for instance /b/ and /d/, or /c/ and /t/. The other result was the subject had a problem to pronounce some words, for example, when she spoke the word “buku” (book), she always made the reverse word such as /ku.bu/. In addition, the subject found it difficult to speak a word with one syllable such as “jam” (watch) or “bor” (drill). The third result was the subject still difficult to point out her face part while she pronounced the name of it, for example when she said “mata” (eye), she pointed out her cheek. The conclusion is the individual with global aphasia who experienced the language rehabilitation within a year still faced some difficulties on language utterance, but the subject still can communicate with normal people.
KEYWORDS
Global aphasia, phoneme, rehabilitation, treatment, individual, Javanese