Effects of language proficiency and language of the environment on aphasia therapy in a multilingual

We examined the relative proficiency of four languages (Spanish, German, French, English) of a multilingual speaker with aphasia, JM. JM’s self-rated proficiency was consistent with his naming accuracy for nouns and verbs (The Object and Action Naming Battery, Druks & Masterson, 2000) and with his performance on selected subtests of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (Paradis & Libben, 1987). Within and between-language changes were measured following two periods of language treatment, one in a highly proficient language (Spanish) and one in a less-proficient language (English). The various outcome measures differed in their sensitivity to treatment-associated changes. Cross-language treatment effects were linked to the language of the environment at the time of testing and to relative language proficiency.

► Therapy in the less-proficient, language of the environment, improved production.
► Cross-language effects linked to language of environment and language proficiency.
► Picture naming and the Bilingual Aphasia Test yielded different results.
► Different subtetests of The Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) yielded different results.