The professor of the Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies of the University of the Basque Country/EHU, Amaia Munarriz, has gathered together in a work the linguistic pathology aphasia (loss of the ability to speak) and the analysis of bilingualism. Munarriz has tried to understand how linguistic problems appear in both languages in bilingual people after a brain injury.

The objective was to understand how languages and their components are organised in a bilingual brain. As showed by the press release of the UPV, the researcher has carried out a longitudinal study of a bilingual person of Basque/Spanish. The longitudinal sample was formed by twenty sessions, where data of spontaneous conversations and experimental tasks were combined. All tasks were carried out in Basque and Spanish, using similar materials.

When speaking with the aphasic person, Munarriz gather data of spontaneous speech. Furthermore, she succeeded in investigating more specific structures through experimental tasks. She worked with aphasic people, who have been her main objective, as well as with monolingual and bilingual people, with or without linguistic pathologies, with the aim of comparing results.  

The conclusion is clear: brain injuries do not produce equally damage at all linguistic levels and, among the problems that appear in both languages, there are similarities and differences.

In general, symptoms are more similar in those linguistic levels in which Basque and Spanish are more similar, for example, in the phonetic-phonological level corresponding to sounds, and in the lexical level, in similar words such as tiger or tigress (cognate words).

However, differences in linguistic action are more visible in those components where Basque and Spanish are different, such as the morphosyntactic level (Basque is a SOV language (subject-object-verb), which counts on a system of ergative-absolutive cases; however, Spanish is a SVO language, which counts on a nominative-accusative system).