The answers to the previous basic science questions matter deeply because they have critical clinical implications. In the absence of a clear understanding of the organization and interaction between bilinguals’ languages in the multilingual brain, clinicians regularly fail to leverage spared or recovered knowledge in one language to aid the retrieval of the other in brain-damaged bilingual individuals, resulting in recovery rates that are well below those of its monolingual counterparts. In our lab, we combine systematic research on healthy bilingual individuals with the study of aphasic patients, when possible, to advance our basic understanding of the neurobiology of multilingualism. This knowledge should in turn help develop strategies that maximize language recovery after brain damage in a demographic group that is the majority of the world, and will soon be the majority of the US population. Thus, this applied research has the potential to lead to a mechanistic understanding of the bilingual language architecture and to the development of novel, theoretically informed recovery strategies for post-stroke aphasic individuals.
NYU DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY
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