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Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Lexical access in a bilingual speaker with dementia: Changes over time
Marianne Lind1,2, Hanne Gram Simonsen1, Ingeborg Sophie Bjønness Ribu3
1a Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan , University of Oslo , Norway.
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics
|October 19, 2017
Summary
This study examines a bilingual speaker with Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) and their naming abilities in English and Norwegian. Language differences diminished over time, supporting the Transmission Deficit Hypothesis for lexical retrieval.
Area of Science:
- Neurolinguistics
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Neurology
Background:
- Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) affects language abilities, including naming.
- Bilingualism presents unique challenges and insights into language processing and degradation.
- Understanding lexical retrieval in neurodegenerative diseases is crucial for diagnosis and intervention.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the naming skills of a bilingual English-Norwegian speaker with PPA.
- To compare language performance in L1 (Norwegian) and L2 (English) across different speech contexts and over time.
- To evaluate the findings against the Transmission Deficit Hypothesis and Inhibitory Deficit Theory.
Main Methods:
- Case study of a single bilingual individual with PPA.
- Assessment of naming skills in confrontation naming, narrative, and conversation tasks.
- Data collection at two time points: 12 and 30 months post-diagnosis.
Main Results:
- Initial L2 (English) performance was lower than L1 (Norwegian), but this gap narrowed as the disease progressed.
- Naming deficits were observed across all tasks, with particularly low performance in the narrative task for both languages.
- The participant remained engaged in conversation, especially in L1, and performance was influenced by word class, frequency, and cognateness.
Conclusions:
- The participant's naming patterns support the Transmission Deficit Hypothesis.
- The study highlights the dynamic nature of language attrition in bilingual PPA.
- Findings offer valuable insights for both research and clinical practice in managing language disorders in dementia.
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