Department of Learning Disabilities, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Behav Brain Funct. 2009 Mar 12;5:17. doi: 10.1186/1744-9081-5-17.
An understanding of how two languages are represented in the human brain is best obtained from studies of bilingual patients who have sustained brain damage. The primary goal of the present study was to determine whether one or both languages of an Arabic-Hebrew bilingual individual are disrupted following brain damage. I present a case study of a bilingual patient, proficient in Arabic and Hebrew, who had sustained brain damage as a result of an intracranial hemorrhage related to herpes encephalitis.
The patient's performance on several linguistic tasks carried out in the first language (Arabic) and in the second language (Hebrew) was assessed, and his performance in the two languages was compared.
The patient displayed somewhat different symptomatologies in the two languages. The results revealed dissociation between the two languages in terms of both the types and the magnitude of errors, pointing to aphasic symptoms in both languages, with Hebrew being the more impaired. Further analysis disclosed that this dissociation was apparently caused not by damage to his semantic system, but rather by damage at the lexical level.
The results suggest that the principles governing the organization of lexical representations in the brain are not similar for the two languages.
对双语患者大脑中两种语言的表现进行研究，最能深入了解这两种语言在大脑中的呈现方式。本研究的主要目的是确定一位阿拉伯语-希伯来语双语个体的一种或两种语言在大脑受损后是否会受到影响。我介绍了一位双语患者的病例研究，该患者精通阿拉伯语和希伯来语，因疱疹性脑炎引起的颅内出血而导致大脑受损。
评估了患者在第一语言（阿拉伯语）和第二语言（希伯来语）进行的几项语言任务中的表现，并比较了他在两种语言中的表现。
患者在两种语言中的表现略有不同。结果显示，两种语言在错误的类型和程度上存在分离，表明两种语言都存在失语症状，希伯来语的受损程度更严重。进一步的分析表明，这种分离不是由语义系统的损伤引起的，而是由词汇水平的损伤引起的。
结果表明，大脑中词汇表征组织的原则对于两种语言来说并不相同。
