Cross-linguistic dissociations in Kannada-English bilingual persons with aphasia and alexia

Individuals with alexia manifest reading impairments comparable to spoken language impairments. With escalating dependency on communication through texts, emails, and other social media sources, these individuals express their interest in improving written language skills as well. Alexia in bilinguals in the Indian scenario is of special interest, owing to diverse geographical, cultural, traditional, and linguistic demarcations in India. Although substantial research is reported on bilingual aphasia, evidence on bilingual alexia is scarce. The study aimed to explore the cross-linguistic dissociations in Kannada-English bilingual individuals with alexia in post-stroke survivors. Thirteen Kannada-English bilingual individuals (10 males and 3 females) with reading and language impairments post ictus, above 18 years of age were recruited. Participants were subjected to neurobehavioral linguistic and reading tasks in both Kannada and English. The performance of linguistic tasks and reading tasks were analysed for cross-linguistic distinctions, linguistics versus reading, and correlation between linguistics and reading abilities. Results revealed evident cross-linguistic dissociations, wherein participants outperformed in Kannada (L1) in both linguistics and reading domains. All performed superior in the linguistics domain compared to reading. In both languages, semantic abilities were best performed within the linguistic domains. Oral reading abilities fared poor scores relative to reading comprehension. The correlation analysis revealed strong correlation between oral reading and semantics > phonology > syntax. Reading comprehension strongly correlated to syntax > phonology > semantics. The study proved convincing linguistic influences on reading abilities in Kannada- English bilingual context. Most investigations have predominantly centred on case observations, and have often lacked thorough pre- and post-rehabilitation assessments of linguistic and reading impairments using equivalent tests in a bilingual context. This study proves to be a preliminary attempt in this context. A much larger bilingual alexia cohort would aid in substantiating the reading impairments in a variant of subgrouping of aphasia.