Contributions of Pre and Postmorbid Nondominant Language Interventions to Coactivation of L1-L2 Lexical Representations: A Case Study of Persian-English Bilingual Stroke-Induced Aphasic Patients

Abstract

The current study sought to bring into light the important functions of pre and postmorbid nondominant language interventions and aphasia patients’ level of L1-L2 proficiency considering the productive dimension of vocabulary knowledge affected by intertrial tasks. Two Persian-English bilingual cases with anomia and different levels of postmorbid L2 proficiency were subjected to a treatment of English naming to find the contribution of English naming improvement to Persian naming. Both cases were given the therapeutic language intervention to enhance their naming performance of English lexical items and to find out whether it could be generalized to Persian equivalents. Data obtained from the 2 participants were analyzed using semantic naming tests, and the responses were validated through time-series analysis. Statistical findings suggested that participant 1, who had a higher L2 proficiency, exhibited higher performance than participant 2 throughout 5 consecutive trials, once they had received phonemic cues after semantic ones. Concerning within-language impacts, treated items exhibited a considerable improvement. The treated items and repeated untreated ones improved concerning cross-language impacts. © 2021 – Published by Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz