A case study about the interplay between language control and cognitive abilities in bilingual differential aphasia: Behavioral and brain correlates

Publication date: May 2018Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics, Volume 46Author(s): Lize Van der Linden, Laurence Dricot, Miet De Letter, Wouter Duyck, Marie-Pierre de Partz, Adrian Ivanoiu, Arnaud SzmalecAbstractThe current study examines the hypothesis that differential aphasia may be due to a problem with language control rather than with language-specific impairment and how this is related to non-linguistic cognitive control abilities. To this end, we report a case study of an L2 dominant French-English bilingual aphasia patient with larger impairments in French than in English. We assessed cross-language interactions using cognates in three lexical decision (LD) tasks, and non-linguistic cognitive control with a flanker task. We also examined functional connectivity between brain regions crucial for language control and language processing. We observed the preservation of cognate effects in a generalized lexical decision task requiring little language control, which indicates intact functionality (and cross-lingual interactivity) of lexical representations. On the other hand, we found diminished linguistic as well as non-linguistic control abilities, suggesting a domain general control impairment. Resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rs-fMRI) analysis revealed altered connectivity between the patient's language control and processing network, consistent with the behavioral data. Altogether, these results are in line with the hypothesis that differential ap...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research