Originally Posted by
Fabbro, Franco. "The Bilingual Brain: Bilingual Aphasia." 2001.
From a clinical and ethical
viewpoint, it is no longer acceptable that bilingual aphasics be assessed in only one of the
languages they know. Bilingual aphasic patients should receive comparable language tests in
all their languages. In the present work, language recovery of 20 bilingual Friulian–Italian
aphasics was investigated. Thirteen patients (65%) showed a similar impairment in both lan-
guages (parallel recovery), four patients (20%) showed a greater impairment of L2, while three
patients (15%) showed a greater impairment of L1. Despite the many hypotheses advanced to
account for nonparallel recovery, none of them seems to provide satisfactory explanations.
The study of bilingual aphasics with parallel impairment of both languages allows us to verify
the hypothesis whereby grammatical disorders in aphasia depend on the specific structure of
each language. As far as rehabilitation programs for multilingual aphasics are concerned, sev-
eral questions have been raised, many of which still need a satisfactory answer.
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