Serving bilingual patients with aphasia: challenges, foundations, and procedures

Abstract

Bilingualism and multilingualism are a common occurrence in today's world. Many bilinguals (speakers of two languages) and multilinguals or polyglots (speakers of more than two languages) in multilingual population centers receive speech therapy for acquired language problems or aphasia as a result of neurological damage. Serving these bilingual and multilingual aphasic patients involves theoretical and clinical challenges for speech therapists. This article proposes a multidisciplinary framework as a strategy to overcome such difficulties. Particularly, the proposed approach, guided by the possible interactions among culture, cognition, and language in adult bilinguals, draws from various disciplines, such as sociolinguistics, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and ethnopsychology, to formulate procedures that would increase diagnostic accuracy and therapeutic effectiveness with bilingual and multilingual aphasic patients. Because aphasia is considered a social rather than a purely linguistic phenomenon, this approach ultimately aims to enhance linguistic and communicative skills to support social readaptation.