Grammatical category-specific deficits in bilingual aphasia

We report the naming performance of an early and highly proficient Spanish–Catalan bilingual (JPG) suffering from Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). JPG’s performance revealed a grammatical category-specific deficit, with worse performance in naming verbs than nouns. This dissociation was present in oral and written naming and in his two languages, and it seems to stem from damage to, at least, the lexical level. Despite the fact that JPG’s performance was qualitatively very similar across languages, his second language seemed to be more affected than his first language. These results indicate that the cortical organization of the two languages of highly proficient bilinguals follow similar organizational principles, one of this principles being grammatical class.