Bilingual aphasia: a filed under construction

Samenvatting

Aphasia in bilinguals is still a new field of study. Till now the literature on bilingual aphasia has been mainly focussed on the description of the various recovery patterns (parallel, selective, consecutive, antagonist) in order to test hypotheses about the representation of two (or more) languages in the brain and to test the roles that different types of acquisition play on the outcome of bilingual aphasia. Nevertheless, there is still a consistent lack of description of cases and even more a lack about studies which deal with the recovery pattern and rehabilitation of those (more and more common) cases. The goal of this paper is to give a general overview about the history and the main theoretical models used in bilingual aphasia. The description of a single case study will be used to exemplify the recovery pattern of a bilingual speaker. Some general guidelines for treatment will be proposed.