Aphasia refers to language impairments due to brain damage, such as stroke. With a rising bilingual population coinciding with an increase in stroke incidence, the number of bilingual individuals with aphasia is expected to grow. One hallmark symptom of aphasia is naming deficits, characterized by difficulty accessing and retrieving words. Patterns of naming deficits have been found to differ between nouns and verbs in bilinguals with aphasia, but evidence has been limited to typologically similar languages, such as Spanish and English.

Aphasia treatment plays a significant role in improving naming abilities. Treatment approaches targeting the semantic representation level of lexical access have shown significant treatment effects in bilinguals with aphasia. However, most studies have focused on either noun or verb naming ability, without understanding the extent to which treatment effects differ between these word categories. Mandarin-English bilinguals with aphasia provide a unique opportunity to examine noun and verb naming recovery, given the cross-linguistic variations in nouns and verbs.

In this talk, I will discuss two studies that addressed the above issues: (1) patterns of noun and verb naming in single-word naming and discourse production, and (2) patterns of treatment-induced language recovery of nouns and verbs. Additionally, I will present my ongoing research that aims to use fMRI to investigate functional neural changes following naming treatment in Chinese-English bilinguals with aphasia in Hong Kong. This research helps illuminate how the bilingual brain reorganizes as a result of behavioral language therapy.

Speaker
Dr. LI Ran is an Assistant Professor in the Academy of Language and Culture at Hong Kong Baptist University.She obtained her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at Boston University. Before joining HKBU, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of Hong Kong. Her research primarily focuses on language recovery in adults with post-stroke aphasia using both behavioral and neuroimaging techniques. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including American Jouranl of Speech-Language and Pathology, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Aphasiology, Neuropsychologia, etc.