Profiling performance in L1 and L2 observed in Greek–English bilingual aphasia using the Bilingual Aphasia Test: a case study from Cyprus

Abstract

The Greek and the English versions of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) were used to assess the linguistic abilities of a premorbidly highly proficient late bilingual female after a haemorrhagic cerebrovascular accident involving the left temporo-parietal lobe. The BAT was administered in the two languages on separate occasions by the first author, a bilingual English–Greek speech pathologist. The results revealed a non-parallel recovery in the two languages. This information will be used not only to guide clinical intervention for the patient but also to provide the first report on the manifestations of aphasia in Greek. Moreover, the use of the (Standard Modern) Greek version of the BAT to investigate Greek Cypriot aphasics has implications for the use of the BAT on underspecified languages or dialects. Such studies may help with the development of assessment measures and therapy strategies that focus on specific characteristics of one or multiple languages.

• Cypriot Greek
• diglossia/bidialectism
• language assessment
• recovery patterns
• underspecified/understudied languages
• multilingualism
• aphasia

Acknowledgements

We thank first and foremost PK for her relentless patience and hospitality in her active participation for the purpose of this study. The comments from two anonymous reviewers helped us, so we hope, improve this paper further.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no declarations of interest. The research was partially funded by the Gen-CHILD Project awarded to the second-named author (University of Cyprus, grant no. 8037–61017).

Notes

1. Incidentally, the country where the case study presented in this article was carried out, the Republic of Cyprus, falls into the ‘not all’ group. Unfortunately, as we will lay out below, the unofficial Cypriot Greek variety could not be tested, yet we will allude to some interesting issues for further research (see also the Conclusion section). It is linguistically understudied which carries over to issues of language assessment.

2. See Paradis (1995) for an in-depth discussion on all points raised here; we will return to some aspects within our outlook beyond our single-case study in the Conclusion section of this contribution.

3. Ultimately, our research is driven by determining suitability of the BAT for dialectal variations of Modern Greek, a goal that we consider of high theoretical and clinical importance; to learn more about our ongoing efforts on (a)typical language development, which also includes acquired impairments, see also the website of the Cyprus Acquisition Team (http://www.research.biolinguistics.eu/CAT). At this point, however, we cannot say too much about the suitability of the BAT for non-standard varieties, such as Cypriot Greek, because we do not even know its suitability for the standard variety (see also the Conclusion section). Indeed, this is the first study to administer the complete BAT (i.e. Parts A–C) to a bilingual Greek speaker, that is, the first application of the BAT with its intended use for Greek.

4. There is a working version of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination for diagnostic and research purposes (Papathanasiou, Papadimitriou, Gavrilou, and Mixou, 2008).

5. That is, the variety of Greek adapted in the BAT, which linguists would call Standard Modern Greek (to the extent that it is indeed the same in Cyprus as it is in Greece; see also Arvaniti, 2006; Grohmann, in press).