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

Abstract

This paper reports on the comprehension of movement-derived structures by a Spanish-Basque bilingual with chronic Broca's aphasia. The study reveals adifferential impairmentwhich affects mostly Basque and aselective impairmentin 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.