Generalizable outcomes of bilingual aphasia research

Abstract

A number of constructs developed to account for bilingual aphasia phenomena have been advantageously extended to increase our understanding of language representation, processing, breakdown and rehabilitation in unilinguals as well. In particular, focus on the right-hemisphere-based pragmatic component of verbal communicative competence, the activation threshold, the control of resources, the role of emotion in second language acquisition and that of procedural vs. declarative memory, has led to the suggestion that unilinguals are in fact at one end of a continuum, with multilinguals who speak genetically unrelated languages at the other end. No function is available to the bilingual speaker that is not already available to the unilingual, unidialectal speaker. The only difference seems to be the degree of use the speaker makes of each of the relevant cerebral systems.