Investigating working memory impairments in bilingual aphasia

While most aphasia studies investigate working memory impairments in monolinguals, there is a lesser focus on bilinguals. This study aimed to compare the assumed working memory impairments in individuals with monolingual and bilingual aphasia. Therefore, the study employed both visual and verbal working memory tasks, including the Visual Sequential Memory Test, the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure B, and the Auditory Sequential Memory Test. It was hypothesised that both aphasia groups would exhibit impairments in their visual and verbal working memory performance. A total of 54 participants were recruited, including monolingual (N=10) and bilingual (N=8) individuals with aphasia as well as individuals without any neurological problems(N=36). Both aphasia groups demonstrated significant variability in the visual and auditory memory tasks, with impairments noted in comparison to the reference groups. Although the bilingual aphasia group had lower scores than the monolinguals, these differences were not statistically significant. These findings contribute to our understanding of the less explored domain of working memory impairments in bilingual aphasia.