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Lexical Processing in the Bilingual Brain: Evidence from Grammatical/Morphological Deficits

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Lexical Processing in the Bilingual Brain: Evidence from Grammatical/Morphological Deficits APHASIOLOGY, 2010, 24 (2), 262–287 Lexical processing in the bilingual brain: Evidence from grammatical/morphological deficits Michele Miozzo University of Cambridge, UK, and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA Albert Costa and Mireia Herna´ndez University of Barcelona, Spain Brenda Rapp Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA Background: A few studies have recently documented cases of proficient bilingual individuals who, subsequent to neural injury, suffered selective deficits affecting specific aspects of lexical processing. These cases involved disruption affecting the production of words from a specific grammatical category (verbs or nouns) or the production of irregular versus regular verb forms. Critically, these selective deficits were manifested in a strikingly similar manner across the two languages spoken by each of the individuals. Aims: The present study aims at reviewing these cases of selective cross-linguistic deficits and discussing their implications for theories concerning lexical organisation in the bilingual brain. Methods & Procedures: The studies reviewed here employed a variety of behavioural tests that were specifically designed to investigate the availability in aphasic patients of lexical information concerning nouns and verbs and their morphological characteristics. Outcomes & Results: The brain-damaged bilingual speakers reviewed in the present study exhibited selective deficits for nouns, verbs, or irregularly inflected verbs in both of their languages. Conclusions: The selectivity and cross-language nature of the deficits reviewed here indicates that at least certain language substrates are shared in proficient bilingual people. The fact that these deficits affect grammatical class distinctions and verb inflections—information that is part of the lexicon—further indicates that shared neural substrates support lexical processing in proficient bilingual people. Keywords: Bilingualism; Morphology; Word production; Lexicon. Downloaded by [Johns Hopkins University] at 13:21 14 November 2011 A significant proportion of the individuals on the planet are proficient bi- or multi- language speakers, able to express themselves with ease in multiple languages, Address correspondence to: Michele Miozzo, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK. E-mail: [email protected] We wish to thank all of our colleagues who collaborated in the reports we review here. We are especially grateful to Joana Cholin for her essential contributions to the research with WRG. Our recognition also goes to the participants of our studies, for all the efforts they made to allow us an opportunity to understand the nature of their impairments. This research was supported by NIH grants DC006242 (to Michele Miozzo) and DC006740 (to Brenda Rapp) and Spanish Government Grants SEJ- 2005/CONSOLIDER-INGENIO (to Albert Costa). # 2010 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business http://www.psypress.com/aphasiology DOI: 10.1080/02687030902958381 LEXICAL PROCESSING IN THE BILINGUAL BRAIN 263 moving from one to the other as the situation demands. How does the brain accomplish such a feat? In an attempt to answer this question researchers have investigated, among other things, how multiple languages are cognitively and neurally organised, how this organisation is similar or different from that of monolingual speakers, and the extent to which this organisation is affected by factors such as level of proficiency or age of acquisition. A wide array of approaches and methodologies have been brought to bear on these questions, including neuroima- ging, neuropsychology, and psycholinguistics. The present paper is a review of the literature specifically concerned with the issue of the production of words in multilingual speakers and the extent to which the cognitive and neural substrates of lexical representation and retrieval are shared across languages. We first provide a brief overview of the neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and psycholinguistic literature on the cognitive and neural organisa- tion of multiple languages. Second, we specifically discuss the cognitive architecture of word (lexical) processing in the monolingual speaker in order to provide a backdrop for discussion of bilingual lexical processing. Finally, we report on lexical deficits in bilingual aphasia. The focus of this last and major section of the paper is a detailed summary of five neuropsychological case studies that we have previously presented in separate publications (Cholin, Goldberg, Bertz, Rapp, & Miozzo, 2007; de Diego Balaguer, Costa, Sebastia´n-Galle´s, Juncadella, & Caramazza, 2004; Herna´ndez et al., 2008; Herna´ndez, Costa, Sebastia´n-Galle´s, Juncadella, & Ren˜e, 2007). These case studies concern individuals who exhibit quite selective lexical deficits affecting such things as their ability to orally name words in a particular grammatical category (nouns or verbs) or their ability to produce morphologically irregular vs regular verb forms. Critically, these selective deficits are manifested in a strikingly similar manner across the two languages spoken by the individuals. The cross-language and yet lexically selective nature of the deficits indicates that at least certain language substrates are shared in proficient bilingual people. THE MULTILINGUAL LANGUAGE SYSTEM: SHARED AND/OR LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC PROCESSES AND SUBSTRATES? Neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and psycholinguistic research has provided valuable information regarding language representation and processing in the multilingual brain. Each approach has its own logic for drawing conclusions about shared or language-specific structures. In the neuropsychological approach, the Downloaded by [Johns Hopkins University] at 13:21 14 November 2011 observation that an individual exhibits associations/similarities between behavioural deficits across languages is taken as evidence of shared processes and brain structures, while dissociations/differences in abilities across languages indicate independent processes and brain structures. Similarly, with neuroimaging data, overlapping activation patterns produced when participants are processing different languages indicate shared structures, while activation differences indicate at least some degree of independence. Finally, in psycholinguistic research the rationale that has been most commonly employed has considered that evidence that processing in one language either facilitates or interferes with processing in the other language indicates shared structures, while the absence of facilitation or interference suggests independence. In examining the evidence provided by these various approaches, it is important to keep in mind the distinction between shared/independent neural substrates and shared/independent cognitive operations. Psycholinguistic research 264 MIOZZO ET AL. directly provides information about shared/independent cognitive operations, but only indirectly about their neural substrates. Neuroimaging research operates in a complementary fashion. In either case, however, while shared substrates may certainly imply shared cognitive operations (and vice versa), it is also possible that independent cognitive operations are carried out in common substrates. An early source of evidence for understanding the brain organisation of language in multilingualism came from the investigations of acquired language deficits in bilingual speakers. Striking among these have been reports of bilingual speakers who have exhibited greater difficulties with one of the languages they had learnt premorbidly or an asymmetry in the pattern of recovery of their language abilities such that one language recovered quickly or more successfully than the other (e.g., Aglioti, Beltramello, Girardi, & Fabbro, 1996; Albert & Obler, 1978; Garcı´a- Caballero et al., 2007; Gomez-Tortosa, Martin, Gaviria, Charbel, & Ausma, 1995; for reviews see Gollan & Kroll, 2001; Green, 2005; Green & Abutalebi, in press; Paradis, 1977, 2001). At face value, these cross-language differences/dissociations would seem to favour the hypothesis that each language is served by (at least somewhat) independent brain structures. However, the interpretation of this neuropsychological evidence is problematic, as has been pointed out by several investigators. A first difficulty concerns whether language-specific effects could reflect different levels of proficiency and/or use of the two languages, either before or after the neural injury (Green, 2005). The greater familiarity or practice with one language could protect the language from damage or could favour its recovery. In fact, increased exposure to the less-dominant language, after the injury, may have facilitated the more rapid recovery of this language relative to the dominant language and may even explain cases of individuals who appear to be less affected in the language that, premorbidly, they had used less frequently or proficiently. Language proficiency and use are often poorly described, making it difficult to establish whether the apparent language-specific impairments actually reflect the neural organisation of the language system or are, instead, the consequence of differential patterns of proficiency and use. Another difficulty in interpreting apparent dissociations has been pointed out by Pitres (1895), Green (1986), and Paradis (1998), and more recently by Abutalebi and collaborators (Abutalebi & Green, 2007; Abutalebi, Miozzo, & Cappa, 2000) who suggested
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