Generalizable outcomes of bilingual aphasia research

A number of constructs developed to account for bilingual aphasia phenomena have been advantageously extended to increase our understanding of languag e representation, processing, breakdown and rehabilitation in unilinguals a s well. In particular, focus on the right-hemisphere-based pragmatic compon ent of verbal communicative competence, the activation threshold, the contr ol of resources; the role of emotion in second language acquisition and tha t of procedural vs. declarative memory, has led to the suggestion that unil inguals are in fact at one end of a continuum, with multilinguals who speak genetically unrelated languages at the other end. No function is available to the bilingual speaker that is not already available to the unilingual, unidialectal speaker. The only difference seems to be the degree of use the speaker makes of each of the relevant cerebral systems.