Clinical Neurolinguistics of Bilingualism
نویسندگان
چکیده
The notion of bilingualism refers to all those people who use or simply know two or more languages, including dialects (Grosjean, 1994 ). Just to provide some fi gures, let us consider that something like 7,000 languages are spoken in barely 160 countries. Furthermore, in many of these countries the number of spoken languages is constantly growing due to massive immigration. This means that over 50% of the world population knows at least two languages with different degrees and can be consequently considered not only bilingual but even multilingual (Tucker, 1998 ). The issue of language representation and use in multilingual speakers can be approached at different levels of description. Indeed, it constitutes a matter of interest not only for sociolinguistic models of language use and stratifi cation, but also for psycholinguistic theories of language development and functioning, as well as for neurolinguistic models of language representation in the brain, its loss and potential recovery. As such, the issue of bi /multilingual competence constitutes an important line of research for both clinical and theoretical neurolinguistics (Fabbro, 2001a ). Accordingly, after introducing the issue of the defi nition of multilingual competence, this chapter will explore the loss and recovery patterns in both adult and child bi /multilingual speakers with different etiologies (aphasias, specifi c language impairment, neuropsychiatric and progressive neurodegenerative disorders). In the fi nal section of this chapter, the focus will be shifted to the critical problem of multilingual assessment in the neuropsychological evaluation of linguistic defi cits in multilingual patients.
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