Code-Switching En Bilinguale Afasie

In the literature on bilingual aphasia a number of patients have been described that show (spontaneous) language switching. Unfortunately, there is a lack of relevant information about the actual switching behaviour in the descript ion of these cases. In general, the occurrence of the phenomenon is stressed rather than the linguistic characteristics of the switches in spontaneous speech. In the present article, a more detailed description is given of a patient who appeared to switch between his native language (Dutch) and several foreign languages (French, German, English) in the first post-onset month. Transcriptions of spontaneous speech were analysed in order to get more insight into the switching process. Many switches seem to result from word finding problems. In some cases the word finding problems were 'solved' by using foreign words or sentences; in other cases the patient simply gave up and started a new sentence. Data on code-switching in bilingual aphasia are compared with data on non-aphasic code-switching. The two types of code-switching appear to differ considerably with regard to structural aspects of switching behaviour.