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Differential and selective morpho-syntactic impairment in Spanish-Basque bilingual aphasia*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2014

AMAIA MUNARRIZ ,
MARIA-JOSÉ EZEIZABARRENA  and
M. JUNCAL GUTIERREZ-MANGADO
AMAIA MUNARRIZ*
Affiliation:
University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU
MARIA-JOSÉ EZEIZABARRENA
Affiliation:
University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU
M. JUNCAL GUTIERREZ-MANGADO
Affiliation:
University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU
*
Address for correspondence: Amaia Munarriz Ibarrola, Faculty of Arts, Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, Unibertsitatearen ibilbidea, 5, 01006, Vitoria-Gasteiz (Araba/Álava)Spain[email protected]
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Abstract

This paper reports on the comprehension of movement-derived structures by a Spanish-Basque bilingual with chronic Broca's aphasia. The study reveals a differential impairment which affects mostly Basque and a selective impairment in this language that affects only object questions and subject relatives. The impairment pattern observed is discussed in light of the predictions made by different representational and processing accounts for (monolingual as well as bilingual) Spanish and Basque agrammatism.

The asymmetry observed between the two languages suggests that the patient resorts to language-specific morpho-syntactic cues, which cannot be transferred from one language to the other because of the typological distance between Spanish and Basque. The data confirm results from previous studies showing that (major) typological distance hinders cross-language effects from arising in bilingual aphasia.

Keywords

bilingual aphasiacross-language effectswh-questionsrelative clausesSpanish–Basque bilingualism
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 19 , Special Issue 4: Cross-language Effects in Bilingual Production and Comprehension , August 2016 , pp. 810 - 833
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

This research would not have been possible without the generous collaboration of the participants and the financial support by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (CSD2007-00012), the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2012-37884-C03-02; FFI2012-32212), the Basque Government (BFI06.65; IT-676-13; IT-311-10) and the University of the Basque Country (UFI11/06). We express our gratitude to Naama Friedmann and Celia Jakubowicz for the materials used in the study, to Marie Pourquié and Itziar Laka for their help and feedback and to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their comments.

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