Diagnostic markers of language impairment in bilingual adults

双语成人语言障碍的诊断标志 项目总结 失语症指的是局灶性或退行性脑损伤后的语言障碍，有 由于社会、情感和经济原因对生活质量的削弱作用 反响。相当大比例的失语症患者是双语者，因为几乎 五分之一的美国人口和超过一半的世界人口会说两种语言。这个 熟练程度不同的双语者和有语言障碍的人之间的语言行为重叠 失语症使得双语失语症的诊断特别具有挑战性。然而，几乎没有 任何有效的心理测量学诊断工具来诊断失语症并将其与 双语者之间的语言差异。超过三分之二的美国临床医生报告说 由于没有有效的诊断工具，没有准备好评估双语成年人和 对双语障碍的认识不足。拟议的研究代表了 首次系统的英语临床语言测量的心理测量学调查 跨多种语言领域说西班牙语和英语的双语成年人。该项目将 建立语言衡量标准、人口标准和截止分数有三个目的： 失语症的识别、形态句法和词汇语义障碍的诊断 失语症。该项目的结果将提高诊断的准确性，从而减少 双语成人失语症的健康差异。

DIAGNOSTIC MARKERS OF LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT IN BILINGUAL ADULTS PROJECT SUMMARY Aphasia, which refers to language impairment following focal or degenerative brain injury, has a debilitating effect on a person’s quality of life due to its social, emotional and financial repercussions. A significant proportion of persons with aphasia are bilingual, given that nearly one-fifth of the U.S. population and over one-half of the world’s population is bilingual. The overlap in language behaviors between bilinguals of varying proficiency and persons with aphasia makes the diagnosis of bilingual aphasia particularly challenging. Yet, there are hardly any psychometrically valid diagnostic instruments to diagnose aphasia and differentiate it from the language variation seen across bilinguals. Over two-thirds of clinicians in the U.S. report being unprepared to assess bilingual adults due to unavailability of valid diagnostic tools and insufficient understanding of bilingual language disorders. The proposed research represents the first systematic psychometric investigation of clinical language measures in English for Spanish-English speaking bilingual adults across multiple language domains. The project will establish language measures, population norms and cut-off scores with a three-fold purpose: identification of aphasia, diagnosis of morphosyntactic and lexicosemantic impairments in aphasia. The outcomes of this project will improve diagnostic accuracy and therefore reduce health disparities for bilingual adults with aphasia.