Variation in language mixing in multilingual aphasia

ABSTRACT

Mixing languages within a sentence or a conversation is a common practice among many speakers of multiple languages. Language mixing found in multilingual speakers with aphasia has been suggested to reflect deficits associated with the brain lesion. In this paper, we examine language mixing behaviour in multilingual people with aphasia to test the hypothesis that the use of language mixing reflects a communicative strategy. We analysed connected language production elicited from 11 individuals with aphasia. Words produced were coded as mixed or not. Frequencies of mixing were tabulated for each individual in each of her or his languages in each of two elicitation tasks (Picture sequence description, Narrative production). We tested the predictions that there would be more word mixing: for participants with greater aphasia severity; while speaking in a language of lower post-stroke proficiency; during a task that requires more restricted word retrieval; for people with non-fluent aphasia, while attempting to produce function words (compared to content words); and that there would be little use of a language not known to the interlocutors. The results supported three of the five predictions. We interpret our data to suggest that multilingual speakers with aphasia mix words in connected language production primarily to bypass instances of word-retrieval difficulties, and typically avoid pragmatically inappropriate language mixing.

KEYWORDS:

• Code-switching
• lexical retrieval
• anomia
• connected speech
• bilingual aphasia

Acknowledgments

We thank the participants and their families, and we thank the research assistants at the Lehman neurolinguistics lab. We thank Dr. Marianne Lind for her invaluable insights in earlier stages of this project. This paper was supported in part by NIH grant DC009792 (PI: Goral), the Norwegian Extra Foundation for Health and Rehabilitation through EXTRA funds [2011/2/0279], and by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265.

Statement of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

¹ In this paper we use the terms bilingual and multilingual to refer to an individual who uses more than one language. The terms are used interchangeably.

² As previous studies of aphasia in multilingual speakers have, we use the term ‘post-CVA proficiency’ but recognize that it could be somewhat misleading because the language abilities following the stroke are affected by pre-CVA proficiency, by the effects of the stroke, and by pre- and post-CVA language use (see Lerman, Goral, & Obler, under review).

Additional information

Funding

This paper was supported in part by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders [DC009792]; the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265, and the Norwegian ExtraFoundation for Health and Rehabilitation  [2011/2/0279].