ABSTRACT
What makes bilinguals atypical for the purpose of this volume is the fact that they are generally not included—and sometimes are explicitly excluded—from current aphasiology models. The reason for their exclusion is that they are often suspected of not fitting these models (Habib, Joanette, Ali-Chérif, & Poncet, 1983; Henderson, 1983; Lecours, 1980; Lecours, Branchereau, & Joanette, 1984). Yet it will be argued here that there is nothing atypical about bilingual aphasics on two counts; (a) Bilinguals represent the majority of the world population and (b) there is no cognitive or neural mechanism that is specific to bilingualism. Ever since Albert and Obler (1978) speculated that bilinguals may differ from unilinguals with regard to their patterns of cerebral organization, research has concentrated on identifying differences; nevertheless, no valid clinical or experimental evidence for any qualitative difference between people who speak one language and people who speak more than one language has been identified. Hence, bilinguals do fit into any model of the cerebral representation of language and of aphasiology. In fact, it will be shown that, ironically enough, models developed to account for certain aspects of bilingual aphasia may be fruitfully extended to the study of the unilingual brain.
