Primary progressive aphasia in a bilingual speaker: a single-case study

Abstract

We report on the case of an elderly bilingual woman presenting with a diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia. The participant's native language was Friulian (L1), a predominantly oral Romance language, and her second language was Italian (L2), formally learned at primary school in oral and written forms. We investigated her linguistic abilities by means of the Bilingual Aphasia Test ( Paradis, M., & Libben, G. (1987). The assessment of bilingual aphasia. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), which is specifically devised for studying language levels and skills in bilingual/polyglot individuals with aphasia. Specifically, we focused on different tasks extracted from the Bilingual Aphasia Test, targeting phonology, morphology, syntax and lexical semantics. Results show that both languages were affected to a clinically significant degree, but with different profiles in terms of linguistic levels, suggesting the presence of greater phonological, morphological, grammatical and syntactic impairments in L2. Results are discussed in terms of possible dissociations both within the language system of each language and between languages, within the Procedural/Declarative theoretical framework of language acquisition in bilinguals.

Comparing language outcomes in monolingual and bilingual stroke patients

“…posterior) regions (Ullman, 2001). This model naturally predicts different activation profiles in functional imaging studies when bilingual speakers process spoken sentences in their native and non-native languages (Dehaene et al , 1997; Yokoyama et al , 2006), and is also supported by neuropsychological case reports associating selectively impaired recovery in the native language with damage to basal ganglia structures (Fabbro and Paradis, 1995; Garcia-Caballero et al , 2007), and selectively preserved grammatical processing in the native language with the preservation of the same structures (Zanini et al , 2011). However, other neuropsychological studies point to grammatical deficits in both first and subsequent languages arising from anterior lesions, contrary to the procedural/declarative model’s predictions (Tschirren et al , 2011).…”

Prophylactic treatments for anomia in the logopenic variant of primary progressive aphasia: cross-language transfer

“…As a result, the level of generalizability of positive treatment effects to other individuals remains unclear. Furthermore, no treatment studies involving bilingual or multilingual individuals with PPA have been reported previously, although the language deficits of these individuals have been described in the literature (Druks & Weekes, 2013; Filley et al, 2006; Hernandez et al, 2008; Kambanaros & Grohmann, 2012; Larner, 2012; Liu, Yip, Fan, & Meguro, 2012; Machado, Rodrigues, Simoes, Santana, & Soares-Fernandes, 2010; Zanini, Angeli, & Tavano, 2011). The current study is a valuable contribution, as it expands the PPA literature to include a Norwegian-English bilingual individual, and it is the first study to examine cross-language transfer of treatment effects in bilingual PPA.…”

Grammatical deficits in bilingual Azari – Farsi patients with Parkinson's disease

“…In addition, when we (Zanini, Angeli, & Tavano, 2011) investigated a late bilingual patient with Primary Progressive Aphasia, namely a patient with a cortical degenerative disorder, we found that her neurolinguistic profile was characterized by aphasic deficits involving phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical levels, affecting L2 to a greater extent than L1.…”