Impact of Bilingualism on the Severity of Aphasia

Aphasia is a common disorder associated with stroke that affects how an individual communicates or processes language. There is ongoing speculation within the neuroscientific community over whether bilingual patients would have an advantage in recovering from aphasia, a language disorder, compared to monolingual individuals. This discussion centers on the potential for bilingualism to confer cognitive and neural benefits that might facilitate language reacquisition after a brain injury or stroke. To demonstrate this, various studies show that bilingualism results in higher cognitive control, which then leads to a faster recovery rate of aphasia. This paper will discuss the effects of bilingualism on post-stroke aphasia, concluding that recovery is aided for both languages when they are linguistically similar. Additionally, this paper will discuss the effects of other factors such as the age of language acquisition, the age of aphasia acquisition, gender, and family language proficiency that must be considered when studying the effects of bilingualism on aphasia (and have been severely understudied). Results for this proceed to conclude that while gender does not significantly impact recovery, early late age of acquisition for L2 and family proficiency have an inverse correlation with the severity of the symptoms and a direct correlation with the recovery rate of aphasia. By studying the role of bilingualism on the severity of aphasia, this research can provide valuable insights into aiding the recovery of post-stroke aphasia and possibly help open future forms of intervention or treatment.