Preserving lexical retrieval skills across languages in a bilingual person with logopenic primary progressive aphasia

ABSTRACT

Background

The treatment of lexical retrieval in monolingual people with the logopenic variant of primary progressive aphasia (lvPPA) has been observed to preserve or improve skills to varying degrees. There is a paucity of treatment literature for multilingual people with PPA (across all types), although based on the stroke-induced aphasia literature we would expect treatment to be effective in the treated language and potentially the untreated language too.

Aims

We investigated the effects of a verb-based semantic treatment administered in a later-acquired language to an English-Hebrew speaker with lvPPA on her lexical retrieval skills in different language tasks in both the treated and untreated languages.

Methods & Procedures

Language skills across different tasks were assessed pre- and post-treatment, with Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) provided in Hebrew. We evaluated whether decline continued for lexical retrieval (as observed in the years leading up to the study), and in which language(s).

Outcomes & Results

We observed that lexical retrieval skills in both languages did not decline for word production, sentence production, and written narratives, but did continue to decline during oral narrative production.

Conclusions

Our results indicate that VNeST may be an effective prophylactic treatment for the preservation of lexical retrieval skills in both a treated and untreated language of multilingual people with the logopenic variant of PPA.

KEYWORDS:

• Logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia
• multilingual
• Verb Network Strengthening Treatment
• lexical retrieval
• cross-language generalisation

Acknowledgments

We thank the participant in the study for her time and commitment to this research. We also thank our three research assistants, Anna Wolfbein, Gal Lavi and Ori Menachem who, together with the third author (Y.N.) collected and transcribed the data and/or provided treatment to the participant. Furthermore, we are grateful to the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful and important feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.