Impaired word retrieval in aphasia : a trilingual case study

Abstract

Numerous studies have reported multilingual speakers with aphasia in linguistically similar Indo-European languages. This study is the first to document the performance of a trilingual Cantonese-English-Mandarin aphasic speaker on cognitive and naming tasks. The primary hypothesis was that naming performance would vary according to linguistic similarity leading to the prediction that naming performance in Cantonese and Mandarin would be more similar than performance in English. Contrary to these expectations, the results showed patterns of naming in constrained and unconstrained contexts that were not statistically different across languages. However, dissociations were observed in different modalities between linguistically similar and dissimilar languages. Code switching patterns also varied in the two elicitation contexts. Results suggest that language dominance has a greater impact than linguistic similarity between languages in the patterns of aphasia that might be observed in multilingual Cantonese-English-Mandarin speakers.