Ivanova Iva, Salmon David P, Gollan Tamar H
1Department of Psychiatry,University of California,San Diego,California.
2Department of Neurosciences,University of California,San Diego,California.
J Int Neuropsychol Soc. 2014 May;20(5):534-46. doi: 10.1017/S1355617714000228. Epub 2014 Apr 11.
In this study, we investigated dual-language decline in non-balanced bilinguals with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) both longitudinally and cross-sectionally. We examined patients' naming accuracy on the Boston Naming Test (BNT: Kaplan et al., 1983) over three testing sessions (longitudinal analysis) and compared their performance to that of matched controls (cross-sectional analysis). We found different longitudinal and cross-sectional patterns of decline: Longitudinally, the non-dominant language seemed to decline more steeply than the dominant language, but, cross-sectionally, differences between patients and controls were larger for the dominant than for the non-dominant language, especially at the initial testing session. This differential pattern of results for cross-sectional versus longitudinal decline was supported by correlations between decline measures and BNT item characteristics. Further studies will be needed to better characterize the nature of linguistic decline in bilinguals with AD; however, these results suggest that representational robustness of individual lexical representations, rather than language membership, might determine the time course of decline for naming in bilinguals with AD.
在本研究中，我们对可能患有阿尔茨海默病（AD）的非平衡双语者的双语衰退情况进行了纵向和横向调查。我们在三个测试阶段（纵向分析）检查了患者在波士顿命名测试（BNT：Kaplan等人，1983年）中的命名准确性，并将他们的表现与匹配的对照组进行比较（横向分析）。我们发现了不同的纵向和横向衰退模式：纵向来看，非优势语言的衰退似乎比优势语言更陡峭，但横向来看，患者与对照组之间在优势语言上的差异比在非优势语言上更大，尤其是在初始测试阶段。横断面与纵向衰退结果的这种差异模式得到了衰退指标与BNT项目特征之间相关性的支持。需要进一步的研究来更好地描述AD双语者语言衰退的本质；然而，这些结果表明，个体词汇表征的表征稳健性而非语言归属，可能决定了AD双语者命名衰退的时间进程。
