Naming and discourse production : a bilingual anomic case study

Abstract

Though numerous studies have reported language recovery patterns in bilingual speakers with aphasia in Indo-European languages, studies of bilingual Chinese speaker with aphasia are not found. This paper presents a Cantonese-Mandarin bilingual speaker with aphasia and compares his performance in each dialect by examining both lexical retrieval and discourse production. Contrary to the expectations that he would perform differently in both dialects, results suggested that asymmetries in performance may be less likely found among structurally similar languages. Results also revealed word class effects in the absence of language effects in object and action naming. Further investigation on pattern of recovery in different modalities of structurally similar languages would contribute to studies of recovery pattern in bilingual Chinese speakers with aphasia.