Chronic Aphasia Recovery in Bilingual Spanish-English and Monolingual Adults

Authors

Kristina RuchFollow

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

Master of Science (MS)

Major/Program

Speech-Language Pathology

First Advisor's Name

Monica Hough

First Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Chair

Second Advisor's Name

Angela Medina

Second Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Chair

Third Advisor's Name

Elaine Ramos

Third Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Chair

Keywords

Aphasia, bilingualism, speech language pathology

Date of Defense

7-21-2020

Abstract

The purpose of the current investigation was to investigate and compare aphasia recovery patterns in bilingual and monolingual adults with chronic aphasia. Ten participants with aphasia who were at least one year post-injury were assessed and compared using the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) (Paradis & Libben, 1987) in order to examine their aphasia recovery and language abilities.Bilingual participants performed significantly better in English than in Spanish in naming . Furthermore, results revealed an overall trend towards significance across all of the verbal subtests, with better performance in English than Spanish. Significant differences were noted between groups in English, with the monolingual group performing better than the bilingual group on lexical decision task but the bilingual group performing better than the monolingual group on verbal series. Overall, the bilingual participants performed significantly better than the monolingual group on verbal production in English. The study findings suggest that bilingual versus monolingual aphasia recovery may be different for certain skills at certain times in recovery, but further investigation is needed.

Identifier

FIDC009180

Recommended Citation

Ruch, Kristina, "Chronic Aphasia Recovery in Bilingual Spanish-English and Monolingual Adults" (2020). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 4455.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/4455