Treatment in Bilingual People with PPA: Evidence-Based Practice or Trial-and-Error?

EasyChair Preprint no. 6576

Abstract

Introduction Clinicians treating bilingual patients with PPA are unable to apply evidence-based practice, and often rely on data from post-stroke bilingual aphasia studies.However, the decline of two languages in a bilingual person with PPA differs from post-stroke language impairment, because of the underlying brain injury.PPA treatment also differs from stroke-aphasia treatment, encompassing both prophylaxis and remediation.To date, there is one published treatment study on a bilingual person with the logopenic variant of PPA (lvPPA), who received treatment in a more impaired later-acquired language (L2).Results indicated that treatment effects were observed in the treated L2 and potentially in the untreated L1.Methods We investigated the effects of a verb-based semantic treatment on both languages of an English-Hebrew bilingual person with lvPPA.Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) was provided in the more-impaired L2, while language skills were assessed in both languages pre- and post-treatment.We assessed whether decline continued or was halted during treatment, and whether any effect on decline was specific to targeted lexical retrieval skills in the L2 and/or L1.Results General language deterioration continued during treatment, based on WAB-R scores, and oral narratives, in both languages.There was no significant decline for lexical retrieval skills in either language for words, sentences, or written narratives.Our results indicate that VNeST was a partially effective prophylactic treatment in both languages in this pre-morbidly highly proficient person with lvPPA.Conclusions Our results support those observed previously: in a bilingual person with lvPPA, treatment in L2 is partially effective in preserving the L2 and may also be effective in L1.However, limitations in recruiting and treating this population are acute, and measuring language decline vs. stability is challenging.More research is badly needed in this field.

Keyphrases: multilingual, primary progressive aphasia, treatment

@Booklet{EasyChair:6576,
  author = {Aviva Lerman and Dorit Mais and Yael Nissani and Taryn Malcolm},
  title = {Treatment in Bilingual People with PPA: Evidence-Based Practice or Trial-and-Error?},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 6576},

  year = {EasyChair, 2021}}