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Basque-Spanish Bilingual Aphasia: A Case-Study to Reveal Frequency-Based, Language-Agnostic Lexical Organization in
Esti Blanco-Elorrieta1,2, Miren Arantzeta3
1Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
Neurobiology of Language (Cambridge, Mass.)
|July 1, 2025
Summary
Language organization in bilinguals is governed by general cognitive principles like word frequency and concreteness, not by language itself. A stroke patient showed similar errors across languages, but different words were affected, indicating an integrated lexical system.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Investigating how multilingual individuals organize their lexicon is crucial for understanding cognitive architecture.
- Previous research suggests language may be a primary organizational principle in bilinguals' lexical systems.
- Established principles like word frequency and concreteness influence lexical access in monolinguals.
Purpose of the Study:
- To determine if language or general cognitive principles (frequency, concreteness) primarily organize lexico-semantic representations in bilinguals.
- To examine the impact of lesion location in the inferior temporal gyrus on lexical organization in a bilingual individual with anomic aphasia (PWA).
- To compare lexical organization principles between a PWA and a control group of bilinguals.
Main Methods:
- A case study of a highly proficient Basque-Spanish bilingual with anomic aphasia (PWA) following a stroke.
- MRI to identify lesion location (inferior temporal gyrus).
- Naming-by-definition task with stimuli orthogonally varied by frequency (high/low) and concreteness (high/low), administered to the PWA and 24 age-matched bilingual controls.
- Generalized linear mixed models used for statistical analysis.
Main Results:
- Both word frequency and concreteness significantly affected naming accuracy in all participants.
- The PWA showed a disproportionately larger impairment for low-frequency words, consistent with their lesion location.
- The PWA exhibited similar overall error rates across Basque and Spanish, but the specific words affected differed between languages.
Conclusions:
- The inferior temporal gyrus plays a role in frequency-based lexical organization.
- Bilinguals appear to possess an integrated lexical system governed by general cognitive principles, rather than language-specific organization.
- Findings challenge the view that language itself is the dominant organizational axis in the bilingual mind/brain.
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