Resumen de Simulating Recovery from Bilingual Aphasia

Paul Meara

• This paper describes how Random Boolean Networks can be used to simulate simple lexicons, and it shows how some puzzling properties of real lexicons seem to emerge spontaneously in these models. It goes on to describe some simple simulations of bilingual aphasia, and shows that a range of "recovery patterns” can be observed in these simulations. The patterns are not unlike the recovery patterns reported in the clinical literature—for example all five of Paradis' main recovery types are observed.

  This suggests that it may be unreasonable to expect a single rule or a set of simple rules to account for recovery patterns in bilingual aphasics. If very simple models produce a large range of behavior patterns in recovery simulations, it seems unlikely that a single rule of recovery could underlie the patterns found in real lexicons.