Semantic feature analysis treatment in Spanish–English and French–English bilingual aphasia

Abstract

Background: Edmonds and Kiran (2006) reported that training lexical retrieval in one language resulted in within‐language and cross‐language generalisation in three bilingual (English–Spanish) patients with aphasia.

Aims: The present experiment continues this line of research, repeating a similar procedure with new patients and examining a broader range of factors that may affect generalisation patterns.

Methods & Procedures: Four participants (two Spanish–English and two French–English speakers) with anomia post CVA received a semantic feature‐based treatment aimed at improving naming of English or Spanish/French nouns. Using a multiple baseline design, generalisation to untrained semantically related and unrelated items in each language was measured during periods of therapy first in one language, then in the other.

Outcomes & Results: All patients improved their naming of the trained items in the trained language, although to varying degrees. Within‐language generalisation to semantically related items occurred in two Spanish–English patients and one French–English patient. Cross‐language generalisation to translations and semantically related items occurred only for one French–English patient.

Conclusions: The impact of the intervention is very clear. The semantic feature‐based practice is linked to the gains made, and accounts for the predominance of semantic naming errors after treatment. Possible explanations for the different patterns of generalisation are considered in terms of the various factors including each patient's pre‐stroke language proficiency, age of acquisition of each language, post‐stroke level of language impairment, and type and severity of aphasia.

Keywords:

• Cross‐language generalisation
• Bilingual aphasia
• Naming treatment
• Semantic feature analysis
• Aphasia.

Notes

This research was supported by an American Speech and Hearing Foundation New Investigator Grant to the first author. The authors thank Claudine Choquette, Mélanie Cohen, Anne Duff, and Deborah Kauffman for their work with the four patients. The translation advice of Linguistek and the University of Ottawa translation service was also very helpful. And, above all, we thank the four volunteers with aphasia who participated in the study over many hours of repetition and testing. Both authors contributed equally to this paper.