The recovery process of a bilingual aphasic.

The recovery process during the first year poststroke in an English-Japanese bilingual aphasic is analyzed with special emphasis on the effect of language therapy. The patient initially manifested equally severe impairment in both English and Japanese involving all language modalities with moderate impairment of reading and auditory comprehension and severe impairment of oral production and writing. Language therapy was conducted in English in a community where Japanese was the only language in the environment. In the course of language therapy, auditory and reading comprehension improved almost simultaneously in both English and Japanese. In contrast, oral language production and writing abilities improved markedly only for the treated language (English). The results are discussed in terms of their implication for the effect of language therapy on aphasia.