We describe a 57-year-old Russian-Hebrew bilingual aphasic patient who received speech-language therapy in his second language (Hebrew) in the first three-and-a-half months post onset and then in his first language (Russian) for an additional month and a half. He was first diagnosed with Expressive-Receptive aphasia in both languages. After four weeks of treatment in the second language, his language skills improved and he was subsequently diagnosed with Predominantly Receptive aphasia in both languages. Three-and-a-half months post onset, he was diagnosed differently in the two languages: Predominantly Receptive aphasia in Hebrew and Amnestic aphasia in Russian. Following additional six weeks of therapy, this time in his first language (Russian), the patient was diagnosed as Amnestic in both his languages. We present the course of his improvement as seen in four successive evaluation periods in both the treated and nontreated languages, in all language modalities. We address various factors that may have contributed to the nonparallel recovery of the two languages and discuss the relative contribution of spontaneous recovery, therapeutic transfer, language proficiency, language use, and structural relations between the two languages.

The LCS for the minimally responsive patients proved to be reliable and predictive of rehabilitation progress of minimally responsive patients. It may be useful for the interdisciplinary rehabilitation team in planning early individually targeted therapeutic programmes.

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Naming is a complex, multi-level process. It is composed of distinct semantic and phonological levels. Children with naming deficits produce different error types when failing to retrieve the target word. This study explored the error characteristics of children with language impairment compared to those with typical language development. 46 preschool children were tested on a naming test: 16 with language impairment and a naming deficit and 30 with typical language development. The analysis compared types of error in both groups. In a group level, children with language impairment produced different error patterns compared to the control group. Based on naming error analysis and performance on other language tests, two case studies of contrasting profiles suggest different sources for lexical retrieval difficulties in children. The findings reveal differences between the two groups in naming scores and naming errors, and support a qualitative impairment in early development of children with naming deficits. The differing profiles of naming deficits emphasise the importance of including error analysis in the diagnosis.