Naming actions and objects in bilingual aphasia: A multiple case study

Abstract

Patients with anomia typically have difficulty naming objects (nouns) and actions (verbs). Anomia is also observed in bilingual speakers with aphasia (Paradis, 2001 M. Paradis, Bilingual and polyglot aphasia. Handbook of Neuropsychology (2nd ed.), Elsevier Science, Oxford (2001).Paradis, 2001). However no study has compared action and object naming in bilingual patients. Bogka et al. (2003) compared the naming of objects and actions in normal Greek–English bilingual speakers. They reported effects of language status with naming in the first acquired language (L1) better than the second acquired language (L2) and an effect of word type with object naming better than action naming in both languages. Some cognitive models of bilingual language processing explain an effect of language status as a result of mediated access to L2 word forms (via L1) while others assume greater weight decay for L2 compared with L1 in the lexical system ([De Groot, 1992], [Kroll and Stewart, 1994] and [Kroll and De Groot, 1997]). These effects may be exaggerated in bilingual aphasia. Although all models predict that L2 naming will be less efficient than naming in L1, no model expects differences in object and action naming across languages following brain damage. We report here three bilingual speakers, BRB, a Turkish-English speaker, and JM and PJ, two German-French speakers; all made object naming errors in L1 and L2. We expected all three patients to perform better in L1 (Turkish or German) than L2 (English or French) on both object and action naming tasks. However, given results from Bogka et al. (2003), we also predicted that object naming would be better preserved than action naming; we further examined effects of word frequency, length, familiarity, imageability and AoA on object and action naming performance in L1 and L2.