AUTHOR=De Letter Miet , Cocquyt Elissa-Marie , Cromheecke Oona , Criel Yana , De Cock Elien , De Herdt Veerle , Szmalec Arnaud , Duyck Wouter 

TITLE=The Protective Influence of Bilingualism on the Recovery of Phonological Input Processing in Aphasia After Stroke

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 11 - 2020

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.553970

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2020.553970

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=Language related potentials are increasingly used to objectify (mal)adaptive neuroplasticity in stroke-related aphasia recovery. Using pre-attentive (mismatch negativity-MMN) and attentive (P300) phonologically-related paradigms, neuroplasticity in sensory memory and cognitive functioning underlying phonological processing can be investigated. In aphasic patients, MMN amplitudes are generally reduced for speech sounds with a topographic source distribution in the right hemisphere. For P300 amplitudes and latencies, both normal and abnormal results have been reported. 
The current study investigates the pre-attentive and attentive phonological discrimination ability in 17 aphasic patients (6 mono- and 11 bilinguals, age 41-71) at two timepoints during aphasia recovery. Between the two timepoints, a significant improvement of behavioral language performance in both languages is observed in all patients with the MMN-latency at timepoint 1 as a predictive factor for aphasia recovery. In contrast to monolinguals, bilingual aphasic patients have a higher probability to improve their processing speed during rehabilitation, resulting in a shortening of the MMN latency over time, which sometimes progresses towards the normative values.