Treatment for Anomia in Bilingual Speakers with Progressive Aphasia.

Stephanie M Grasso,Rozen Neupane,Maria Luisa Gorno-Tempini,Haideh Mirzapour,Borna Bonakdarpour,Elizabeth D Peña,Nina Kazemi,Maya L Henry

doi:10.3390/brainsci11111371

Abstract

Anomia is an early and prominent feature of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and other neurodegenerative disorders. Research investigating treatment for lexical retrieval impairment in individuals with progressive anomia has focused primarily on monolingual speakers, and treatment in bilingual speakers is relatively unexplored. In this series of single-case experiments, 10 bilingual speakers with progressive anomia received lexical retrieval treatment designed to engage relatively spared cognitive-linguistic abilities and promote word retrieval. Treatment was administered in two phases, with one language targeted per phase. Cross-linguistic cognates (e.g., rose and rosa) were included as treatment targets to investigate their potential to facilitate cross-linguistic transfer. Performance on trained and untrained stimuli was evaluated before, during, and after each phase of treatment, and at 3, 6, and 12 months post-treatment. Participants demonstrated a significant treatment effect in each of their treated languages, with maintenance up to one year post-treatment for the majority of participants. Most participants showed a significant cross-linguistic transfer effect for trained cognates in both the dominant and nondominant language, with fewer than half of participants showing a significant translation effect for noncognates. A gradual diminution of translation and generalization effects was observed during the follow-up period. Findings support the implementation of dual-language intervention approaches for bilingual speakers with progressive anomia, irrespective of language dominance.

Highlights

The majority of individuals worldwide speak two or more languages (e.g., [1,2]); most studies that have evaluated the benefits of speech-language intervention for individuals with aphasia have focused on monolingual speakers (e.g., [3,4,5,6,7,8])
We briefly review neurodegenerative syndromes that may present with progressive anomia, summarize the literature examining restitutive interventions in monolingual and bilingual speakers with progressive anomia, and present evidence for treatment-induced cross-linguistic transfer in bilingual aphasia
The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of an established lexical retrieval training approach in a series of bilingual speakers with progressive anomia

Summary

Introduction

The majority of individuals worldwide speak two or more languages (e.g., [1,2]); most studies that have evaluated the benefits of speech-language intervention for individuals with aphasia have focused on monolingual speakers (e.g., [3,4,5,6,7,8]). This disparity is even more striking in aphasia caused by neurodegenerative disease (e.g., [9,10]). This necessitates careful consideration of therapeutic manipulations that may be used to support multiple languages for bilingual speakers, especially given the shortage of bilingual speech-language pathologists in the United States [13]

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