Blog honen helburua euskaraz hizkuntza patologiei buruz egiten diren ikerketen berri ematea da, eta Marie Pourquié-ren ikerketa proiektu eta interes nagusien aurkeztea.
ABOUT
Basque, French and Spanish, the three main languages spoken in the Basque country, belong to different language families and display distinct grammatical properties. Basque is said to be one of the oldest languages of Europe and yet very few studies have analysed language impairment in Basque speakers. Since Basque is a language isolate, considered as genetically unrelated to any other language family, its study will provide new and original data to the field of clinical linguistics and the neurocognitive science of language. Moreover, the study of behavioural dissociations in language processing from a cross-language perspective is meant to shed light on the underlying neurocognitive organization of human grammar.
The lack of research on Basque in the field of clinical linguistics is partly due to the fact that Basque-speaking patients are typically assessed in French or Spanish rather than in their dominant language, or are assessed in Basque using tools that have not been standardized or psychometrically validated. According to the 7th Sociolinguistic Survey, approximately 20% of Basque speakers report being more fluent in Basque than in Spanish or French and approximately 30% report being equally fluent in both languages. Therefore, it becomes absolutely necessary to develop standardized clinical tools in Basque that enable the assessment of Basque speakers in their dominant language, in order to prevent misdiagnosis by distinguishing symptoms of language disorders from difficulties arising from limited language exposure, use, or proficiency.
My research is theoretically and empirically driven: I am particularly interested in assessing lexical and morphosyntactic atypical processing from a cross-language perspective, in aphasia and Developmental Language Disorders in particular. At the same time, I am developing language assessment tools suitable for Basque-X bilingual speakers in order to contribute to cross-language research development in clinical linguistics and neuroscience of language (Cf. Projects). In addition, these studies allow multilingual speakers with language disorders to be assessed in their native language(s) and the language(s) they use on a daily basis.
