Language mixing patterns in a bilingual individual with non-fluent aphasia

ABSTRACT

Background: Language mixing in bilingual speakers with aphasia has been reported in a number of research studies, but the reasons for the mixing and whether it reflects typical or atypical behaviour has been a matter of debate.

Aims: In this study, we tested the hypothesis that language mixing behaviour in bilingual aphasia reflects lexical retrieval difficulty.

Methods & procedures: We recruited a Hebrew-English bilingual participant with mild-moderate non-fluent agrammatic aphasia and assessed his languages at three timepoints. We analysed the participant’s Hebrew and English production for retrieval during single-word naming, sentences, and discourse, and identified all instances of language mixing.

Outcomes & Results: We found that there was a greater frequency of language mixing during production of more difficult lexical items, namely the post-morbidly less proficient language (compared to the more proficient language), function words (compared to content words), and single-word naming (compared to retrieval in the context of connected speech tasks), but not for verbs (compared to nouns).

Conclusions: In this bilingual participant with non-fluent aphasia, language mixing behaviour closely resembles lexical retrieval difficulty. Thus, we suggest that bilingual speakers with aphasia may mix their languages as a strategy to maximise communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Language mixing
• aphasia
• codemixing
• codeswitching
• bilingual

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participant for his continued participation in bilingual aphasia research, and to the members of the neurolinguistics lab in Lehman College, CUNY, for their help in scoring and analysing the data. Additionally, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valued comments and suggestions in shaping this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The only exception to this was the use of the word “ve” [“and” in Hebrew] when the target language was English. The participant used this word very frequently during the connected speech tasks, in the context of a filler, probably to indicate to the listener that he had more to say. This disproportionately inflated the relationship between language-mixed and non-language-mixed words when the target language was English. This was not the case when the target language was Hebrew; then the word “ve” was used more appropriately, often as a conjunction. Therefore, “ve” was removed from the analysis when the target language was English but not when the target language was Hebrew.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NIH/NIDCD [DC009792].