Cognate effects and cognitive control in patients with parallel and differential bilingual aphasia.

Background: Until today, there is no satisfying explanation for why one language may recover worse than another in differential bilingual aphasia. One potential explanation that has been largely unexplored is that differential aphasia is the consequence of a loss of language control rather than a loss of linguistic representations. Language control is part of a general control mechanism that also manages non-linguistic cognitive control.

Cognate Effects and Executive Control in a Patient with Differential Bilingual Aphasia.

We describe a case study of a French-Dutch bilingual patient with differential aphasia, showing clearly larger impairments in Dutch than in French. We investigated whether this differential impairment in both languages was due to selective damage to language-specific brain areas resulting in the "loss" of the language representation itself, or rather if it reflects an executive control deficit. We assessed cross-linguistic interactions (involving lexical activation in the most affected language) with cognates in a lexical decision (LD) task, and executive control using a flanker task.

Cognitive differences between patients with left-sided and right-sided Parkinson's disease. A review.

At disease onset, patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) typically report one side of the body to be more affected than the other. Previous studies have reported that this motor symptom asymmetry is associated with asymmetric dopaminergic degeneration in the brain. Research on the cognitive repercussions of this asymmetric degeneration has yielded inconsistent results.