Repetition disorder in Turkish.

Deep dysphasia is a language impairment that is defined by impaired repetition. In this study we report a bilingual Turkish-English patient BRB who shows many of the features of deep dysphasia in both languages. BRB was given lexical and non-lexical processing tasks including oral reading, repetition and writing to dictation manipulating several variables (AoA, regularity, imageability, grammatical class) in Turkish (L1) and English (L2). BRB was also asked to translate orally and in writing both high and low frequency and high and low imageability words from L1 to L2 and from L2 to L1. Significant main effects of language and task as well as interactions between language and task were observed e.g., BRB’s repetition, reading and writing was better in L1 than L2 object naming was better in L2 than L1 but only with high imageability words. We argue that impaired language processing in deep dysphasia arises from the under-activation of phonological representations. We propose that current models of deep dysphasia require modification to explain bilingual deep dysphasia and also interpret BRB’s performance using a model of bilingual lexical processing.