Contributions of Pre and Postmorbid Nondominant Language Interventions to Coactivation of L1-L2 Lexical Representations: A Case Study of Persian-English Bilingual Stroke-Induced Aphasic Patients

Bahadoran-Baghbaderani, Ali; Tahririan, Mohammad Hassan; Saadatnia, Mohammad; Ketabi, Saeed

doi:10.22055/rals.2021.16724

Contributions of Pre and Postmorbid Nondominant Language Interventions to Coactivation of L1-L2 Lexical Representations: A Case Study of Persian-English Bilingual Stroke-Induced Aphasic Patients

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

Ali Bahadoran-Baghbaderani ¹

Mohammad Hassan Tahririan ¹

Mohammad Saadatnia ²

Saeed Ketabi ³

¹ English Language Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Sheikhbahaee University, Isfahan, Iran

² Department of Neurology, Isfahan Neurosciences Research Center, Faculty of Medicine, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran

³ English Language Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

10.22055/rals.2021.16724

Abstract

The current study sought to bring into light the important functions of pre and postmorbid nondominant language interventions and aphasia patients’ level of L1-L2 proficiency considering the productive dimension of vocabulary knowledge affected by intertrial tasks. Two Persian-English bilingual cases with anomia and different levels of postmorbid L2 proficiency were subjected to a treatment of English naming to find the contribution of English naming improvement to Persian naming. Both cases were given the therapeutic language intervention to enhance their naming performance of English lexical items and to find out whether it could be generalized to Persian equivalents.Data obtained from the 2 participants were analyzed using semantic naming tests, and the responses were validated through time-series analysis. Statistical findings suggested that participant 1, who had a higher L2 proficiency, exhibited higher performance than participant 2 throughout 5 consecutive trials, once they had received phonemic cues after semantic ones. Concerning within-language impacts, treated items exhibited a considerable improvement. The treated items and repeated untreated ones improved concerning cross-language impacts.

Keywords

Lexical Retrieval

L1-L2

Pre and Postmorbid Language Proficiency

Nondominant Language

Stroke-Induced Aphasia

Anomia