Abstract
Anomia is an early and prominent feature of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and other neurodegenerative disorders. Research investigating treatment for lexical retrieval impairment in individuals with progressive anomia has focused primarily on monolingual speakers, and treatment in bilingual speakers is relatively unexplored. In this series of single-case experiments, 10 bilingual speakers with progressive anomia received lexical retrieval treatment designed to engage relatively spared cognitive-linguistic abilities and promote word retrieval. Treatment was administered in two phases, with one language targeted per phase. Cross-linguistic cognates (e.g., rose and rosa) were included as treatment targets to investigate their potential to facilitate cross-linguistic transfer. Performance on trained and untrained stimuli was evaluated before, during, and after each phase of treatment, and at 3, 6, and 12 months post-treatment. Participants demonstrated a significant treatment effect in each of their treated languages, with maintenance up to one year post-treatment for the majority of participants. Most participants showed a significant cross-linguistic transfer effect for trained cognates in both the dominant and nondominant language, with fewer than half of participants showing a significant translation effect for noncognates. A gradual diminution of translation and generalization effects was observed during the follow-up period. Findings support the implementation of dual-language intervention approaches for bilingual speakers with progressive anomia, irrespective of language dominance.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 1371 |
Journal | Brain Sciences |
Volume | 11 |
Issue number | 11 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Nov 2021 |
Funding
Funding: This work was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) Grants, F31DC016229 (awarded to S.M.G.), R01 DC016291 and R03 DC013403 (awarded to M.L.H.), National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Grant R01 NS050915 and NIDCD Grant K24 DC015544 (awarded to M.L.G.T.).
Keywords
- Bilingualism
- Intervention
- Primary progressive aphasia
- Treatment
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Neuroscience