Cortical Aphasia: Language Impairments and Recovery Patterns in Bilingual Turkish-Persian Aphasics

Nowadays, the investigation of the brain-language relationship is considered to be one of the complicated scientific issues. Among the different scientific fields, neurolinguistics is more interested in exploring this relationship. The most important issues in neurolinguistic studies are the aphasias and language recovery patterns resulting from the damage of the cortical or subcortical brain structures in bi/multilingual aphasics. In this paper, linguistic impairments, aphasia type and recovery patterns in two bilingual Azerbaijani Turkish-Persian aphasics with cortical brain lesions were studied.  The research method employed in this study was a descriptive one. Bilingual Azerbaijani Turkish-Persian aphasics living in Zanjan province constituted the study population of this study. As a sample, two subjects, based on their linguistic, pathological and cognitive conditions, were selected from twenty aphasics who were content to participate in this study. To evaluate their linguistic performance and gather the required data, the Turkish and Persian versions of the bilingual aphasia test (BAT), which includes 32 subtests, were employed. Data analyses showed that the first patient (case A) had better linguistic performance in his L1 than his L2. Moreover, he had poor performance in the comprehension of his L2. Concerning the linguistic behaviors of the second patient (case B), it became clear that he had more linguistic disorders in his L2 compared to his L1. Besides, his language comprehension, compared to his language production, was poor in both languages. All in all, the second patient got better grades in the BAT subtests both in L1 and L2. The current findings showed that both patients had Wernicke’s aphasia in their L1 & L2. In addition, their language recovery patterns were assessed to be parallel. It seems, based on the type of the aphasia and the location of the damaged area of the subjects, that the presence of the lesions in the cortical areas (left parieto-temporal lobe in case A and left frontal lobe, insular & parietal lobes in case B) may lead to the similar aphasia and recovery patterns in the first and second languages of the bilingual Turkish-Persian patients.