Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, CA 92093-0949, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2010 Apr;48(5):1356-66. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.12.038. Epub 2009 Dec 29.
The current study tested the assumption that bilinguals with dementia regress to using primarily the dominant language. Spanish-English bilinguals with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD; n=29), and matched bilingual controls (n=42) named Boston Naming Test pictures in their dominant and nondominant languages. Surprisingly, differences between patients and controls were larger using dominant-language than nondominant-language naming scores, and bilinguals with AD were either more likely than controls (in English-dominant bilinguals), or equally likely (in Spanish-dominant bilinguals), to name some pictures in the nondominant language that they could not produce in their dominant language. These findings suggest that dominant language testing may provide the best assessment of language deficits in bilingual AD, and argue against the common notion that the nondominant language is particularly susceptible to dementia. The greater vulnerability of the dominant language may reflect the increased probability of AD affecting richer semantic representations associated with dominant compared to nondominant language names.
当前的研究检验了这样一个假设，即患有痴呆症的双语者会退回到主要使用优势语言。本研究纳入了 29 名可能患有阿尔茨海默病（AD）的西班牙语-英语双语者和 42 名匹配的双语对照组，让他们用主导语言和非主导语言对波士顿命名测试图片进行命名。令人惊讶的是，与对照组相比，患者在使用主导语言命名时的差异更大，而 AD 患者在主导语言和非主导语言中命名一些图片的可能性要么更高（在英语主导的双语者中），要么相同（在西班牙语主导的双语者中），这些图片他们无法用主导语言命名。这些发现表明，主导语言测试可能是评估双语 AD 患者语言缺陷的最佳方法，这也反驳了一种常见的观点，即非主导语言特别容易受到痴呆症的影响。主导语言的更大脆弱性可能反映了 AD 更有可能影响与主导语言而非非主导语言名称相关的更丰富的语义表达。
