Impairment and Rehabilitation in Bilingual Aphasia: A SOM-Based Model

Bilingual aphasia is of increasing interest because a large and growing proportion of the worlds population is bilingual. Current clinical research on this topic cannot provide specific recommendations on which language treatment should focus in a bilingual aphasic individual and to what extent cross-language transfer occurs during or after rehabilitation. This paper describes a SOM-based model of the bilingual lexicon, and reports on simulations of impairment and rehabilitation in bilingual aphasia. The goal is to create computational methods that can complement clinical research in developing a better understanding of mechanisms underlying recovery, and that could be used in the future to predict the most beneficial treatment for individual patients.