Bilingualism in a Case of the Non-fluent/agrammatic Variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia

Abstract

There is a growing body of research on language impairment in bilingual speakers with neurodegenerative diseases. Evidence as to which language is better preserved is rather inconclusive. Various factors seem to influence language performance, most notably age of acquisition, level of proficiency, immersion and degree of exposure to each language. The present study examined fluency, lexical, discourse and grammatical abilities of a Greek-French late bilingual man with the non-fluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA). Speech samples derived from three different narrative tasks in both languages were analyzed using quantitative production analysis (QPA) and fluency measures. The first aim of the study was to compare the participant's connected speech production to that of Greek-speaking normal controls. The second aim was to determine whether Greek (L1) and French (L2) were differentially impaired. To our knowledge, this is the first report of connected speech deficits in a Greek-speaking patient with PPA and the first study which uses QPA to compare L1 and L2 narratives in a bilingual speaker with PPA. Compared to neurologically healthy controls, our participant was impaired in lexical, discourse and grammatical productivity measures, but did not differ in measures of grammatical accuracy. The presence of dysfluencies, reduced speech rate and simplified syntax is consistent with the pattern of impairment reported for the nfvPPA. Results showed that narrative production measures did not differ significantly between languages. However, they suggest a slightly worse performance in his second, non-dominant, language despite a similar pattern of impairment in both languages. Lengthy exposure to L2 and regular activation of L2 through daily use may explain the preservation of discourse abilities in his non-dominant language. This study calls attention to factors such as language dominance, proficiency, patterns of use, and exposure to a language. These factors play a key role in assessing bilingual individuals with PPA and making clinical decisions.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and Working Memory Training to Address Language Impairments in Aphasia: A Case Study

“…The MAIN [ 38 ] is a tool designed to evaluate narrative tell and retell skills in children but has also been used with adults with acquired language deficits associated with neurological disease for research purposes [ 46 ]. The MAIN stories consist of coloured picture sequences developed according to strict psycholinguistic criteria.…”

Comparing Individuals With PPA to Individuals With AD: Cognitive and Linguistic Profiles

“…The procedure was employed for the analysis of two narrative productions from a picture description task ("Cookie Theft" from the BDAE) and a story retell task (from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives -MAIN) (Gagarina et al, 2019). Detailed information about the QPA and the connected speech analysis procedure employed in this study can be found in Karpathiou et al (2018).…”

The Greek-Cypriot Word Pool: Normative Data for Concreteness and Imageability for 2,950 Words

“…While a lot of work and research has been done on psycholinguistic research over the recent years in Cyprus (e.g., Anyfantis et al, 2023;Charalambous et al, 2023;Grohmann et al, 2021;Karpathiou et al, 2018;Theodorou et al, 2022;Tsiplakou et al, 2022) and words are widely used as stimuli in research (Baddeley et al, 1975;Healey et al, 2018;Traikapi et al, 2022;White et al, 2014), there is a notable lack of such resources available for Greek-Cypriots. The absence of standardized word pools presents a substantial challenge, when conducting research that relies on serial cognitive assessments using alternate test forms.…”