Lexical Organization in Kannada-English and Malayalam-English Bilinguals with and without Aphasia: An Investigation through Translation

Abstract

Lexical organization in the bilingual brain have been explained through several conceptualized models by experiments on typically developing bilingual children neurotypical bilingual adults and bilingual individuals with aphasia. The present study investigates the nature of disruption of two languages in bilingual individuals with aphasia and the nature of lexical organization in bilingual individuals. Two groups of participants were considered for the current study. Group I consisted of ten Kannada-English (KE) and Malayalam-English (ME) subjects with bilingual aphasia and Group II with twenty age-matched neurotypical KE and ME bilingual individuals. The performance of subjects in two groups was compared on tasks of word recognition, word translation, sentence translation and grammaticality judgment of Part C of the Bilingual Aphasia Test. Results revealed significant difference between aphasic and neurotypical subjects except for word recognition task in ME bilingual individuals. Aphasia participants had translation deficits which were evident in the word and sentence translation tasks and grammaticality judgment tasks. These findings revealed that there exists separate lexical stores for both languages. The common unit would be a single conceptual store, which coincides with the Mixed memory model/Distributed feature model. Thus language therapy provided for one language would have beneficial effects on the other language of the bilingual individual with aphasia.