Assessing Grammatical Deficit Overlaps in Bilingual People with Aphasia (BWA): Bilingual Agrammatism Pilot Project

Comprehending and producing sentences requires processing syntactic structures (i.e., grammar), which vary across languages. These structures operate at multiple levels: lexical (words), morphosyntactic (e.g., verb inflections), and phrasal (e.g., word order). Survivors of stroke may develop aphasia, characterized by impairment in grammatical processing (i.e., agrammatism). When bilinguals (i.e, people who have learned more than one language during their lives) have a stroke and acquire agrammatism, their pattern of deficits will be affected by their combination of languages and to their prior pattern of language use. Understanding grammatical deficits in bilingual individuals with aphasia (BWA) is crucial for tailored diagnosis and effective treatment. Unique challenges arise in understanding grammatical deficits in BWA, chiefly the development of tailed studies and recruitment of appropriate participants at scale. There has previously been little research of these populations, so it remains unclear whether these deficits parallel those of monolingual agrammatism or exhibit distinctive patterns.