Assessing Grammatical Deficit Overlaps in Bilingual People with Aphasia (BWA): Bilingual Agrammatism Pilot Project

Comprehending and producing sentences requires processing syntactic structures (i.e., grammar), which vary across languages. These structures operate at multiple levels: lexical (words), morphosyntactic (e.g., verb inflections), and phrasal (e.g., word order). Survivors of stroke may develop aphasia, characterized by impairment in grammatical processing (i.e., agrammatism). When bilinguals (i.e, people who have learned more than one language during their lives) have a stroke and acquire agrammatism, their pattern of deficits will be affected by their combination of languages and to their prior pattern of language use. Understanding grammatical deficits in bilingual individuals with aphasia (BWA) is crucial for tailored diagnosis and effective treatment. Unique challenges arise in understanding grammatical deficits in BWA, chiefly the development of tailed studies and recruitment of appropriate participants at scale. There has previously been little research of these populations, so it remains unclear whether these deficits parallel those of monolingual agrammatism or exhibit distinctive patterns

Scoping Review on Bilingual Aphasia Assessments

I am writing a Scoping Review on Bilingual Aphasia Assessments, which is a piece of literature that showcases any other pieces of literature or resources that exist regarding a specific topic. In this case, the topic is bilingual aphasia assessments. Aphasia is a speech & language disorder, resulting from a stroke, traumatic brain injury, or another type of brain injury or lesion. This scoping review paper is meant to serve as a resource for Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) to use when evaluating an aphasia patient speaking a less common language. With 7,000 languages spoken around the world, many SLPs need aphasia assessments in a variety of languages. This comprehensive list is compiled of standardized and non-standardized assessments, along with those that have been normed and bilingually normed. If an assessment is normed, then it has been measured so that the client\u27s score can be compared to other clients to help measure the severity of their condition. Bilingually normed assessments are normed in language pairs to help show how these two languages measure among one another for particular populations. It is important to include all assessments and resources of all norming statuses because SLPs need all assessment options for their bilingual aphasia clients. The present project has gathered a broad list of all the existing assessments, which is what SLPs need. This research was initially done through hand-searching journals, and the next step will be searching library databases for any information that has been missed. With all of the information and data obtained, it is currently being compiled into an Excel sheet, split up and alphabetized by language. This scoping review will ultimately be accessible to all people who are working with bilingual aphasia patients and need assistance in finding resources and assessments to determine the functioning level of their patient’s language