Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology

Morphosyntactic abilities and deficits in monolingual and bi-/multilingual post-stroke aphasia and dementia

Morphosyntactic processing can be selectively impaired in neurological conditions such as post-stroke aphasia and dementia, particularly in the verbal domain. For example, at least in production, tense has consistently been found to be more impaired than subject–verb agreement. However, considerably less is known about patterns of impairment and preservation in other morphosyntactic categories in the verbal domain, such as voice and grammatical mood. Furthermore, the nominal domain (e.g., case, gender, and agreement/concord involving nouns, adjectives, and determiners) has received substantially less attention than the verbal domain. Another important gap concerns cross-linguistic variation in morphosyntactic deficits. Although influential cross-linguistic investigations of morphosyntax in aphasia have been conducted, most research on aphasia—and even more so on dementia—has focused on English. Consequently, we still know relatively little about how the typological properties of different languages shape patterns of morphosyntactic impairment and preservation. Moreover, although more than half of the world’s population is estimated to be bi-/multilingual, the vast majority of studies on post-stroke aphasia and dementia have either focused on monolingual speakers or examined only the first and/or dominant language of bi-/multilingual speakers, largely disregarding the other languages in their linguistic repertoires.

Against this background, this Special Issue aims to advance our understanding of morphosyntactic abilities and deficits in monolingual and bi-/multilingual speakers with post-stroke aphasia or dementia. We welcome group studies, single-case studies, and case series examining morphosyntactic processing across the verbal and nominal domains. Studies investigating understudied and typologically diverse languages are particularly encouraged, as are studies adopting cross-linguistic and bi-/multilingual perspectives. Through this broader scope, the Special Issue seeks to shed light on both language-specific and potentially universal patterns of morphosyntactic impairment and preservation across neurological conditions.