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Sigrún Gunnarsdóttir,Susanna Whitling

Theories on recovery

1) Pitres claims that a patient that has suffered a lesion doesn’t have to start from scratch when recovering the lost language because the language that is not available is not lost – only inhibited.

2) Minkowski supported Pitres’ theories on polyglot aphasia. That is the assumption that it isn’t necessary to assume the existence of separate centers in the brain responsible for each language.

3) These thoughts were not only those of Pitres and Minkowski but also Freud, Pötzl and Paradis suggest that when a language is not available, it isn’t because its neural substrates have been destroyed but because its system has been weakened.

‘‘If we assume no spatially separate centers or areas in the cortex for the different languages, but instead assume that within the same area, the same elements are active, though in different combinations and interacting with a differential linguistic constellation, it is easy to explain the phenomena occurring in polyglot aphasia in terms of the interaction of such a large set of factors’’ (Minkowski, 1927, p. 229)

References

http:// psych.umb.edu/faculty/adams/fall2003/paper2/bilingual%20brain.pdf http:// content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Aktion=ShowPDF&ArtikelNr=89083&Ausgabe=231457&ProduktNr=223840&filename=89083.pdf Ahlsén, Elisabeth Introduction to Neurolinguistics John Benjamins Publishing Company. USA, 2006.

4) Paradis identified six recovery patterns. Languages can, according to him, be affected in the following ways:

Parallel recovery: both languages are impaired and restored at the same rate.

Differential recovery: the two languages are not recovered to the same extent.

Selective recovery: occurs when one language is not recovered.

Antagonistic recovery: one language recovers to a certain extent first and it starts regressing when the other language begins to recover .

Successive recovery: two languages may eventually recover but recovery of the second language may only begin after the first has recovered, which is called successive recovery of one language after the other. Recovery of one language follows recovery in the other.

Mixed recovery: involves inappropriate and unrestricted blending of the languages.

5) Pitres, Ribot and Minkowski all attempt to explain what Ahlsén in her book Introduction to Neurolinguistics calls dissociated recovery. According to Pitres the most familiar language is the one less impaired and the one to recover first. Ribot claims L1 to be less impaired and to recover first. Minkowski on the other hand indicates the language with the strongest emotional association to be less impaired and to recover first.