On the parallel deterioration of lexico-semantic processes in the bilinguals’ two languages: Evidence from Alzheimer's disease

Costa, Albert; Calabria, Marco; Marne, Paula; Hernández, Mireia; Juncadella, Montserrat; Gascón‐Bayarri, Jordi; Lleó, Alberto; Ortíz-Gil, Jordi; Ugas, Lidia; Blesa, Rafael; Rizzoli, René

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.01.008

Cited by 37 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 88 publications

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“…Prior studies on dementia have shown similar L2 preservation in production tasks such as naming, translation (Costa et al, 2012;Gollan et al, 2010). Our results confirm such patterns and insists on the spared comprehension in the host language, as a consequence of long lasting immersion.…”

supporting

confidence: 89%

“…Likewise, G omez-Ruiz et al (2012) studied Catalan-Spanish bilinguals with Alzheimer's disease using the BAT and observed similar impairments for both languages (G omez-Ruiz et al, 2012). Apart from differences of age of L2 acquisition, one further crucial difference between our and these two studies is that we investigated an immigration population while Costa et al (2012) andG omez-Ruiz et al (2012) studied autochthonous populations of bilinguals, with quite similar exposure to L1 and L2. However, one notable investigation addressed an immigration population but still with early age of L2 acquisition (Salvatierra, Rosselli, Acevedo, & Duara, 2007).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 53%

“…One of such studies assessed the impact of Alzheimer's disease on the two languages in early, highly-proficient CatalanSpanish bilinguals and reported no differences for lexico-semantic tasks (Costa et al, 2012). The authors suggested that both languages of early bilinguals are equally sensitive to neurodegenerative diseases impacting on lexico-semantic language abilities.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cognitive decline in elderly populations is usually associated with decreasing attentional abilities, thus potentially affecting language performance in general, and also the ability to speak several languages (Ardila & Ramos, 2008;Costa et al, 2012). Neurodegenerative dementias, such as Alzheimer's disease, have also been associated with language impairment, independently of the linguistic status of the individual.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Second language performances in elderly bilinguals and individuals with dementia: The role of L2 immersion

Nanchen

Abutalebi²,

Assal³

et al. 2017

Journal of Neurolinguistics

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With the population aging and an increase in the number of senior immigrant citizens in modern societies, public health systems will be increasingly burdened with the need to deal with the care and treatment of bi-or multilingual individuals with cognitive decline and dementia. This raises complex questions such as which language is better preserved in these elderly individuals, particularly for those facing dementias. The main aim of the present investigation was to study in two groups of immigrant populations whether the first language (L1) or the second language (L2) are better preserved. For this purpose, we assessed by means of cognitive and neurolinguistics testing 20 late-bilingual individuals with neurodegenerative dementia of the Alzheimer and mixed type, and compared their results to a matched control group consisting of 19 subjects. Our results suggest that L1 is not better preserved in individuals with dementia. We report a parallel decline of second language across groups, regardless of the presence of dementia, as well as a significant correlation between language immersion and L2 relative performances (r ¼ 0.379, p ¼ 0.03). Moreover our data suggest that individual with dementia may have a relative sparing of syntactic L2 comprehension. These results suggest that these elderly individuals who have lived in a host country for many years, such as the subjects here investigated, may preserve similarly their L2 as much as their L1, irrespectively of the presence or absence of neurodegenerative disease, and even preserve some features of L2 processes in dementia. These results emphasize the role of immersion in language preservation.

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supporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 53%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Second language performances in elderly bilinguals and individuals with dementia: The role of L2 immersion

Nanchen

Abutalebi²,

Assal³

et al. 2017

Journal of Neurolinguistics

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“…Aging bilinguals produced more intrusions than proficiency-matched young bilinguals in both the read aloud task (Gollan & Goldrick, 2016) and in verbal fluency tasks (Gollan, Sandoval, & Salmon, 2011). Additionally, bilinguals with AD produced more intrusion errors with disease progression in both picture-naming and word translation (Costa, et al, 2012). However, it is not known if bilinguals with AD produce more intrusion errors than cognitively healthy bilingual matched controls.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Bilingual language intrusions and other speech errors in Alzheimer’s disease

Gollan

Stasenko

et al. 2017

Brain and Cognition

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The current study investigated how Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affects production of speech errors in reading-aloud. Twelve Spanish-English bilinguals with AD and 19 matched controls read-aloud 8 paragraphs in four conditions (a) English-only, (b) Spanish-only, (c) English-mixed (mostly English with 6 Spanish words), and (d) Spanish-mixed (mostly Spanish with 6 English words). Reading elicited language intrusions (e.g., saying la instead of the), and several types of within-language errors (e.g., saying their instead of the). Patients produced more intrusions (and self-corrected less often) than controls, particularly when reading non-dominant language paragraphs with switches into the dominant language. Patients also produced more within-language errors than controls, but differences between groups for these were not consistently larger with dominant versus non-dominant language targets. These results illustrate the potential utility of speech errors for diagnosis of AD, suggest a variety of linguistic and executive control impairments in AD, and reveal multiple cognitive mechanisms needed to mix languages fluently. The observed pattern of deficits, and unique sensitivity of intrusions to AD in bilinguals, suggests intact ability to select a default language with contextual support, to rapidly translate and switch languages in production of connected speech, but impaired ability to monitor language membership while regulating inhibitory control.

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