Cognitive control in bilingual aphasia

The ability to suppress irrelevant information requires cognitive control. This process plays a key role when bilinguals are required to speak one language and inhibit the non-target language. Previous research evaluating linguistic and non-linguistic inhibition in bilingual and monolingual healthy adults has revealed a bilingual advantage on non-linguistic tasks (Bialystok, 2001; Costa et al., 2008; Luk et al., 2010). However, a case study comparing healthy bilinguals, monolinguals, and bilingual aphasic patients contradicts the aforementioned studies (Green et al., 2010), suggesting that linguistic cognitive tasks may require different processing demands than non-linguistic cognitive tasks. No study has yet systematically examined cognitive control in bilingual aphasia to determine whether deficits in language inhibition are specific to the language domain or are a more general cognitive deficit. The current study investigates the degree to which language general cognitive control in bilingual aphasia is based in the cognitive domain or language domain. We predict that the language inhibition deficits noted in bilingual patients is language domain specific rather than cognitive domain general