Language mixing patterns in a bilingual individual with non-fluent aphasia.
Aviva Lerman, Lia Pazuelo, Lian Kizner and 2 others
PMID 31602085WHAT IT FOUND
In one bilingual man with non-fluent aphasia, language mixing was more frequent when speaking English than Hebrew, in single-word naming than connected speech, and for function words such as pronouns.
Verb versus noun did not differ.
Key findings
01Language mixing was three times more likely when the less proficient English was the target language than when the more proficient Hebrew was the target language, and two times more likely in single-word naming than in connected speech.
02In connected speech tasks, language mixing was almost 5 times more likely when English was the target language than when Hebrew was the target language and 1.37 times more likely for function words than content words.
03Verb versus noun retrieval did not predict language mixing.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
This study describes one person, so it cannot show what most bilingual people with aphasia do. All testers spoke both Hebrew and English, and the participant knew this, so it is unclear whether that changed how often he mixed languages. The participant's non-fluent aphasia made it sometimes difficult to tell whether a single word was intended as a noun or a verb, which could affect the noun-verb result. The function-word analysis used only connected speech tasks, because function words were not elicited in the single-word naming tasks. The three testing times were combined to increase the amount of data, so the analysis does not show how language mixing changed over time.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that bilingual people with aphasia mix languages mainly because their language control system is impaired. This study reports one person, and the authors say retrieval difficulty is probably not the only reason for his mixing.