Multilingualism in Stroke Patients: A Personal Account

Jürg R Schwyter

doi:10.5539/ijel.v3n3p15

Abstract

Multilingualism is a highly complex phenomenon and even more so in the recovery pattern of stroke patients. This papers addresses the following factors with respect to multilingual stroke patients: the age of acquisition of languages, the place of lesion, the language proficiency at the time of the stroke and its recovery during post-stroke training, the speaker’s emotional involvement with the languages and the relative distance between languages. The age of acquisition of languages appears to be of lower importance, and multilingual language recovery of patients with Broca’s area stroke is more complex than that of bilingual patients. Importantly, the languages used prior to the lesion, and the language used during language therapy are highly relevant. Closely linked is the emotional involvement with the various languages in a multilingual person; the deeper the integrative motivation, the more successful the recovery. From a linguistic point of view, the relative distance between languages appears to be of lower importance despite some indications put forward by neurolinguists and clinicians. Quantifiable and measurable parameters, such as the age of acquisition and the place of lesion, have been studied much more frequently than comparatively imprecise ones on emotional involvement and language proficiency/competence at the time of a stroke. But it is exactly the latter parameters that most progress can and should be made on in the future.

Highlights

Multilingualism is not easy to define, and a variety of statements about the exact meaning of the term can be found in the literature
Vol 3, No 3; 2013 example, are there one or more language centres for each language in the brain? Research has shown that during bilingual language recovery, about 45% of aphasia victims experience parallel recovery, that is, the two languages recover to the same level at the same rate; 25% and 20% respectively have a better command of their L1 or L2, and the remaining 10% either switch languages within a sentence or alternate languages between sentences
Multilingualism is not easy to define, in particular what it means to communicate in all languages, either autonomous or heteronomous, on equal or near-equal terms

Summary

Introduction

Multilingualism is not easy to define, and a variety of statements about the exact meaning of the term can be found in the literature (see e.g., Bahtia & Ritchie, 2004). I used to speak and understand five languages (in sequence of acquisition: Swiss German, Standard German, French, English, and Italian), and at the time of writing in early 2013, I have recovered 2 1⁄2 of them. There has been very little or no recovery of my active command of Standard German (the passive mode, is always “there”, and I can read, understand the TV, and so on), or my Italian. This raises a number of interesting questions, some of which I will discuss below

Age of Acquisition

Place of Lesion

Emotional Involvement with Languages

Relative Distance between Languages

Findings

Conclusion