Language impairment and recovery pattern in a bilingual Azerbaijani-Persian aphasic with subcortical brain lesion

The most important issues in the bi/multilingual aphasics study are the types of aphasia and language recovery patterns. This paper reported the linguistic profile (language impairment, aphasia type, and language recovery pattern) of a bilingual Azerbaijani-Persian patient with a subcortical brain lesion (basal ganglia). This study is fundamentally applicable in terms of its purpose. From the perspective of how to analyze the data, it is a case study. The patient was interviewed to determine his linguistic background, and his MRI report was examined to locate his brain lesions. Azerbaijani and Persian versions of the bilingual aphasia test (BAT) were employed to evaluate his linguistic performance. Data analyses showed that the patient had better linguistic performance in his L۲. Moreover, he had poor performance in the production of his L۱ and good performance in the comprehension of his L۱. He could easily translate from L۱ to L۲, but it was not easy to do so from L۲ to L۱. He had Broca’s aphasia in his L۱ and subcortical aphasia in his L۲. In addition, his language recovery pattern was different. We can conclude that the lesion in the subcortical area may not necessarily lead to similar aphasia in the first and second language of the patient. The findings also revealed that Paradis’ neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism and declarative and procedural model could account for the bilingual patient’s linguistic performance and language recovery pattern with subcortical damage.

کلیدواژه ها:

Aphasia ، Bilingualism ، Subcortical ، Language recovery ، Aphasia ، Bilingualism ، Subcortical ، Language recovery