The role of language proficiency and linguistic distance in cross-linguistic treatment effects in aphasia.
Peggy S Conner, Mira Goral, Inge Anema and 7 others
PMID 29969313WHAT IT FOUND
For a multilingual man with mild aphasia, Dutch therapy improved speech efficiency in Dutch and high-proficiency languages, with little gain in lower-proficiency languages and more word mixing in Spanish.
This is a single case, not a pattern.
Key findings
01For this multilingual man, treatment in Dutch improved language production efficiency in Dutch and in four untreated high-proficiency languages: French, English, Italian and German.
02Gains were minimal in lower-proficiency Spanish and Norwegian, with Spanish showing no task gains and Norwegian improving on only one task.
03After treatment, Spanish showed increased whole-word mixing, mainly into Italian, while Norwegian showed no such change.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study describes a single person, so it cannot show what will happen in other multilingual people with aphasia. Each language had only three pre-treatment and three post-treatment sessions. That left very few data points for each result. The researchers could not obtain further clinicians to rescore all languages, so scoring reliability across languages was incomplete. The efficiency measure required manual timing of speech and was too time-consuming for routine clinical use. Testing week activation of multiple languages may have affected the word-mixing results.
Declared interests
No conflicts-of-interest declaration appears in the supplied text. The article is marked as supported by NIH extramural research.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as proof that Dutch therapy will improve all untreated languages. It describes a single person, and gains were strong in high-proficiency languages but minimal in lower-proficiency languages, with increased word mixing in Spanish.