Aspects of Bilingual Aphasia

Aspects of aphasia (partial or total loss of speech, or understanding of speech) are examined in this guide. Practical issues related to diagnosis, prognosis and therapy, as well as more theoretical issues of the organization of two or more languages in one brain, are explored.

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This volume marks the 100th anniversary of the first systematic monograph on polyglot aphasia (Pitres, 1895). Its purpose is to focus the attention of language pathologists around the world, and most particularly in areas traditionally assumed to be unilingual, on the pervasiveness of bilingualism in their communities. The chapters in this book illustrate why it is not sufficient to assess patients in only one of their languages, regardless of its premorbid relative degree of fluency. Members of the IALP Aphasia Committee and their collaborators describe new cases of bilingual aphasia, including acquired childhood aphasia, subcortical aphasia and various types of dissociations and shifts of dominance, whose characteristics could not be predicted on the basis of age or manner of second-language acquisition, context of use or degree of mastery. Bilingual patients reported here speak a variety of languages ranging from structurally very similar (Catalan-Spanish, Friulian-Italian, Japanese-Korean) to structurally quite distant (English-Farsi, English-Japanese).
Practical issues related to diagnosis, prognosis and therapy, as well as more theoretical issues of the organization of two or more languages in one brain, supported by a PET study, are also explored. The considerable diversity of background of the contributors (language pathologists, linguists, neurolinguists, neuropsychologists, neurologists, neurophysiologists and psychologists) attests to the multidisciplinarity and complexity of the issue of bilingual aphasia.