A Case Study of Bilingual Aphasia (in Comparing the Usage of Content and Function Words): A Kurdish-Persian Case

Bilingual Aphasia, as one of the challenging issues in psycholinguistics, has not been received the attention it deserves in Iran. Following the call for more reflection on bilingual aphasia in different languages, the present study seeks to investigate the manifestations of aphasia in the spontaneous speech of a bilingual Kurdish-Persian individual who was diagnosed with Broca's aphasia and to illuminate the recovery pattern of languages by scrutinizing the comparison between content and function word usage. To assess her linguistic competence, the standardized versions of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (Paradis, 1987) were administered. The results indicate non-parallel recovery of languages post-stroke, with L1 (Kurdish) less recovered than L2 (Persian). As far as the assessment of content words is concerned, they are used more than function words in both languages. In L1 (Kurdish) function words are used more than content words, while the opposite is found in L2 (Persian).